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Jwe when I am going to do this year’s interview Women’s award winnerthe first American novelist Virginia Evans, at a party on a drizzly evening in a London garden, we are interrupted because someone wants to congratulate her. Sponsored by Richard Curtis.
Bursting with warmth and gentle humor, Evans’ award-winning novel The Correspondent is Curtis’ masterpiece. In fact, it is too late. “I think he just wants to be my friend,” Evans laughs modestly – Notting Hill is his favorite movie of all time. A A reporter film is already in the pipeline and Jane Fonda plays 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, the title reporter. Evans will be one of the producers and will have a cameo appearance, “walking the dog or something”.
It is a long way from when Evans wrote the book in the bedroom (she removed her husband’s clothes) for nine months in a rented house in North Carolina, during the pandemic of 2020. She did not expect that her story, written in letters, of a former lawyer, to be published, let alone be a word of mouth, which spent 32 weeks on the list of the New York Times.
But the author, who turned 40 earlier this month, is not an overnight success. He has been writing for two hours a day, between 5am and 7am, since he was 19 years old, writing seven unpublished books in front of the Journalist. He said: “It’s my first time. But I don’t feel like the first child, I just feel like the eighth child.”
Over the years he received “thousands of rejections” and sent letters to every literary agency in Manhattan, “once” he says, before trying in London and finally finding Canadian agent Hilary McMahon, who realized he “had what it takes”. But the Journalist was not an easy sell. He said: “It took a few months, and there was silence and there was not much. “It was like I was being rejected and in the end failure was my thing. And it was for a long time – until it didn’t.”
During this time she held several “salaried” jobs – including working as a lawyer and a surgeon and as a barista – while raising her two children, Jack, 13 and Mae, 10, without childcare. As he moved his desk into the bedroom, he was thinking about starting law school. But somehow he did not weaken. With each rejection, “I thought, ‘Well, I can do better and I should do better,'” he says. “If you’re a writer, you can’t no write.”
The format of the book was inspired by Helene Hanff’s 1970 epistolary memoir 84 Charing Cross Road, which Evans read one day during the lockdown. He found it so comforting that he wished it could last longer. So he began to write a book of letters that would take up the rest of his life. John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner also served as a template for how to turn a seemingly unremarkable life into a quietly tragic tale.
Ornery and outspoken, Sybil, a long-divorced mother of three, is an unlikely heroine in the mold of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (it’s no coincidence that the new cover closely resembles Strout’s). Tragedy, late love, betrayal, revenge and gardening club competition are all covered in his letters: letters to his childhood friend Rosalie, his brother Felix, a troubled youth, a Syrian refugee and real figures including Ann Patchett, Joan Didion and George Lucas.
“I love any book that plays with the setting on the page,” Evans says of her choice to tell Sybil’s story in letters. “I think it’s very generous of your readers to let their eyes rest. There’s something about letters that feels like a trick. You fly because the form is simple, but the content is not trivial.”
Although it is romantic and easy to understand, Evans describes The Reporter as a book about sadness and disappointment. At the beginning of the novel we learn that Sybil Gilbert’s son died many years ago in an accident. While he was writing, the six-year-old son of one of his best friends died. Suddenly she felt what it would feel like to lose a child “as much as I can without being mine”. When he returned to the book “the noise of his life and the noise of his death and what it does to the family,” it was explained in every paragraph. He asked his friends for permission to join Wade in gratitude. He said: “He read it and said that he would be respected. “When the book came out, it was not big, but now it has spread all over the world.” His mother often comes to me and says, ‘Every time I see that book somewhere, I think that these people also now know about its existence. So that’s one of the best things about this win. “
Maggie O’Farrell has he said that he hesitated to write the former Women’s award-winning and now Oscar-winning film Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the plague, until his son passed the age of his death. Evans took a different approach – and made Gilbert eight, the same age as his son Jack who was writing at the time. He listened to an interview with Zadie Smith in which the author talked about the fact that you should write what you know, that you should write what you fear, because it makes the most sense in your mind. “I realized this was true,” he said. “I could have written that sadness more accurately by trying to get as close to the thing as possible.”
One of three siblings, Evans grew up in Maryland. It was not a book-loving family. But, like Sybil, she has been writing letters, mostly to writers she admires. Ann Patchett became a writing partner and is now a friend and collaborator of the book. Evans was a little worried about the speculative letters from Didion and Larry McMurty that were included in the book. Both authors responded to fanmail and were careful to ensure that their content was taken into account. He said: “I like receiving letters. I have letters that are a real treasure.” Now many letters are written to him and he must be helped to answer them all.
In all his sadness, he wanted the book to be “uplifted”, he says, holding it in his hands. A lot of books, you get to the end and you’re like, ‘Oh, honey, this is so sad.'” He thinks that this hope may be why the book is so interesting, especially today. Redemption is not unusual in fiction, he admits, which he worries might be read against the Journalist. A book about hope, a book about forgiveness, about grief and about stones because these things are so important, it makes me have hope.
His success meant that he could eventually write full-time, although he would work for two or three hours after the children went to school. And he is out of the room: now he has his own room – “a small balcony”. He is well in a new book, about making a movie. But he still doesn’t believe that he won. Recently he asked his agent: “‘Do you think this thing will sell?’ He laughed at me, said, ‘Yeah, now it will be sold. Everything will be sold.’”
