At the start of this year, I bought myself a set of plain stationery. Just notecards and envelopes — nothing fancy. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do with them.
Then my Crisis Intervention Training began.
For just about sixty-six hours over several weeks, I sat in a room at the Center for Community Solutions and learned about some of the heaviest things human beings do to one another. Sexual assault. Child abuse. Domestic violence. The kind of material that settles into your chest if you let it, that your hands don’t quite know what to do with. So my hands found something to do. I brought the notecards to class and I doodled on them — intricate, paisley-like designs that grew more elaborate as the weeks passed. It kept my hands busy while I listened. While I stayed present with things that are not easy to stay present with.
By the end of my training, I had a small collection of these cards. Each one made in a room full of difficult knowledge, each one covered in something quietly beautiful.
Earlier this week, I used two of them to write letters.
The Letter as a Container for Love
Writing a letter is, I think, a Romantic act — capital R. Even a brief one. You sit down, you choose your words with some care, and you send a little piece of yourself out into the world on a piece of paper. The two friends I wrote to haven’t heard from me in some time. I didn’t know quite how to reach out in the casual way that texts and social media invite — the “hey, thinking of you!” that somehow never feels like enough. A letter felt like the right container for what I actually wanted to say: I love you. You matter to me. Without making it a whole ordeal. Without requiring an immediate response. Just — here. I was thinking of you. I wanted you to know.
I told them about my training. About the cards. I told them that in a way, through that small piece of paper, they had been with me on this journey — present in the room, even without knowing it. Moments in time, connected through paper and ink and the decision to reach out.
It was a relief to send those thoughts out into the world. It always is.
A Life in Letters
This is not a new impulse for me. I grew up understanding that letters are how you hold on to people across distance.
As a teenager, in the early days of the internet, I found a website connecting pen pals across the world — mostly people in other countries who wanted to practice their English. I wrote to a girl in Japan. A girl in France. A girl in China. The letters lasted nearly a year before they tapered off, as these things do, but the experience was formative. Here were people I had never met, in places I had never been, and we were reaching toward each other through words on paper. It felt extraordinary. It still does.
When I left Russia, letters became something more urgent. My friends and I wrote to each other across the distance — the kind of letters you write when you are trying to prove to someone, and perhaps to yourself, that the life you shared still exists somewhere, that the people who knew you before still know you, that you have not simply vanished into a new country and become someone else entirely. Those letters mattered in a way that is difficult to articulate. They were a form of continuity. A thread held taut across an ocean. Those, too, tapered off, as these things do… But they got me through a tough transition in a new country.
And then there were my grandmother’s letters. Alexandra — after whom I was named — wrote in a loopy cursive that I would recognize anywhere. She sent letters with photographs tucked inside. Updates. Well-wishes. Encouragement. The ordinary texture of a life offered up as a gift.
After she passed, I went back to the shoebox where I’ve kept my most important correspondence. I found her letters there, and I found something else I hadn’t remembered receiving — a small set of photographs she had inscribed for an upcoming birthday of mine. In the photographs, she is in her garden, among her vegetables and her flowers. Standing in the life she had made, looking back at the camera with that particular expression of someone who loves you and wants you to know it.
I don’t recall receiving those photographs when they arrived. But I found them at a moment when I needed them — when I needed her — and I think there is something sacred in that. A letter, a photograph, a few words written in longhand: these things wait. They hold their love in reserve, patient and quiet, until the moment arrives when you are ready to receive it. Connection across time and space, from an ancestor who could not have known exactly when you would need her, but sent the love forward anyway.
One of those photographs hangs in my office now. Every day I sit with her. Every day, in the rooms where I do this work — this hard, necessary, hopeful work — she is there with me.
Isn’t that magical? Isn’t that sacred?
I think it is both.
The Radical Act of Specificity
Not all correspondence needs to be long to be lasting.
A friend I met on a trip to London began sending me postcards. He illustrated them himself — small, careful drawings, each one different and each one personal to me. They arrived without warning, and they asked nothing in return except perhaps the knowledge that they had arrived safely. I have them framed on my wall. They are among my most treasured possessions! Someone sat down, put pen to paper, and thought of me specifically. In an age of mass communication, of messages sent to many people at once, of notifications and group chats and posts addressed to everyone and therefore somehow to no one — that specificity feels like a radical act.
I understood this more clearly during the Covid lockdowns.
Isolated from the people I loved, unable to gather, unable to mark time in the ordinary ways, I bought a stack of Thanksgiving cards and sat down to write. I sent them to friends I hadn’t seen in months — some in years. In each one I tried to say what I actually meant: that I was grateful for them. That our friendship was not something I took for granted. That they mattered to me, specifically, by name.
It was a way of saying I love you without making it a whole ordeal. A letter asks nothing urgent of its recipient. It doesn’t demand an immediate response or require anyone to perform a feeling on the spot. It just arrives, and says its true thing, and then quietly waits. There is a generosity in that — a kind of love that makes no demands.
Sending those cards was a relief. It always is, I find, to release love out into the world rather than hold it quietly inside where it can start to feel like longing.
Entering Sybil’s World: Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent
It was with all of this somewhere in my heart — the shoebox, the postcards, the Thanksgiving cards, the doodled notecards from my CIT training — that I picked up The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
I was not prepared for how much it would feel like coming home.
The Correspondent is a debut novel, and it is, simply put, one of the most quietly extraordinary books I have read in some time. It is epistolary — told entirely through letters — which means that the form itself is the story. There is no narrator standing outside the correspondence, explaining or contextualizing. There are only the letters, and what they reveal, and what they withhold.
At its center is Sybil Van Antwerp — seventy-three years old, retired lawyer, divorcée, grandmother, and one of the most devoted correspondents in contemporary fiction. Most mornings, around half past ten, she sits down to write. To her brother. To her best friend Rosalie. To a university dean who won’t let her audit a class. To Joan Didion and Ann Patchett and Larry McMurtry, whom she addresses as though they are personal friends — because to her, in every way that matters, they are.
She is not always easy to like. She can be stubborn, sharp-tongued, occasionally oblivious to the emotional needs of the people closest to her. She makes mistakes — serious ones — that cast long shadows over her relationships and her sense of herself. She is, in other words, entirely human.
But here is what I found irresistible about Sybil: she understands, in her bones, what letters are for.
She understands that writing is a form of thinking — that you do not always know what you believe, or what you feel, or what you need to say, until you sit down and try to say it on paper. She understands that a letter, unlike a conversation, allows you to be precise. To choose. To mean exactly what you write and write exactly what you mean. She understands, too — and this is the part that stayed with me — that letters outlast us. That they carry love forward through time in ways we cannot always predict or control.
There is a line in the novel that stopped me cold when I read it.
“Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.”
I thought of my grandmother’s letters. I thought of the illustrated postcards on my wall. I thought of the doodled notecards, made in a room full of difficult knowledge, waiting to carry something beautiful out into the world.
Yes, I thought. Exactly.
Lives Are Told: The Genius of the Epistolary Form
One of the things that struck me most about The Correspondent — and that deserves particular attention — is how much world Evans builds through what are, on the surface, perfectly ordinary letters and emails.
This is the quiet genius of the epistolary form when it is handled well. No one sits down to write a letter and announces: I will now tell you everything significant about my life. Instead, they mention, in passing, that the neighbor stopped by. That their daughter called and seemed tired. That a case from years ago has been weighing on them. And in those asides, those parenthetical observations, those seemingly offhand remarks — whole lives are contained.
Through Sybil’s correspondence we learn about her distinguished career as chief clerk to Judge Guy Donnelly, but we also learn — gradually, uncomfortably — about a man whose harsh conviction she and the judge handed down together, and what became of him. We learn about the slow, painful deterioration of her marriage not through dramatic confrontation, but through Sybil’s own letters to others — almost confessional in tone, admitting fault, circling the wreckage of a relationship with the kind of honesty she perhaps could not have managed face to face. And we learn about it too through letters written to her — friends and family offering their own careful, loving perspectives on what happened. The marriage is assembled, piece by piece, from multiple points of view. None of them complete. All of them true.
We learn about her daughter Fiona’s fertility struggles not from Sybil herself, but from a letter written by a family friend — the information arriving sideways, filtered through someone else’s worry and love. For Sybil, already carrying the weight of her distance from Fiona, this knowledge becomes another source of quiet pain. Another place where she cannot quite find the words. Another gap she doesn’t know how to close.
And we learn about her neighbor Theodore’s history — a harrowing story of escape from Nazi Germany — not at the beginning of their acquaintance but years into it, offered finally in a kind of confessional letter that could only have been written because of everything that came before it. All the ordinary exchanges. All the small courtesies and observations and shared seasons. Correspondence built that trust slowly, the way trust actually builds — not in grand gestures but in accumulated presence. And then, when it was ready, it held space for something enormous.
And then there are the two new love interests arriving simultaneously in Sybil’s seventies — Theodore and Mick — revealed through letters that shimmer with a kind of late-life giddiness that is both funny and deeply moving. That love should arrive not once but twice, at seventy-three, while going blind, while carrying decades of grief — Evans treats this not as remarkable but as simply, stubbornly, beautifully human.
This is what letters do, in life and in fiction. They don’t tell stories so much as accumulate them. Each one adds a layer. Each one reveals a little more of the person writing and the world they inhabit. Read enough of someone’s correspondence and you have not just their words — you have their silences, their evasions, their preoccupations, the things they return to again and again without quite being able to say directly. You have, in other words, a person.
Evans understands this completely. And so does Sybil — which is perhaps why she has written letters her whole life. Not just to communicate, but to leave a record. To say: I was here. These people mattered to me. This is what it felt like to live.
Forgiveness and the Unsent Letter
But Evans is doing something even deeper beneath the charm and the accumulation of lives. Because Sybil also writes letters she never sends.
For years — decades — she has been composing a letter to someone she cannot yet bring herself to address directly. She adds to it over time, returns to it, sets it aside. It is not quite a journal and not quite a confession. It is something more like a wound being tended slowly, in private, over a very long time. We do not know, for much of the novel, who these pages are addressed to. When we finally find out, it is quietly devastating.
The letters are for Gilbert. Her son. Who is gone.
She has been writing to him for over forty years — processing his loss, her guilt, her grief, her sense of herself as a mother who failed at the most fundamental level. The unsent letter is not a letter at all, in the conventional sense. It is a conversation she has been having with her dead child across the impossible distance of his absence, adding to it as the years passed, returning to it when the weight became too much to carry alone. It is the most private thing she possesses. And it is the thing the novel circles, slowly and carefully, until we are ready to understand what it means.
This is where Sybil becomes more than a charming eccentric and reveals herself as something far more recognizable. Because many of us know this particular dynamic — the ability to be eloquent, open, even vulnerable on paper, while remaining somehow unreachable in person. Writing can be armor as much as it is bridge. It can be the thing that lets us feel connected while quietly preventing the kind of intimacy that could hurt us.
Sybil learned early that people leave. That love is not always enough to make someone stay. And so she writes — beautifully, prolifically, with great warmth — from behind the safety of the page.
What the novel asks, gently and without judgment, is whether she can learn — even at seventy-three, even going blind, even carrying forty years of grief and guilt — to let the letters become something more than protection. Whether she can let them become, finally, a real opening toward the people she loves.
Send the Letter
I finished The Correspondent and then I sat quietly for a while.
Then I got out my notecards — the ones covered in paisley doodles, made in rooms full of hard knowledge — and I wrote two letters.
I am not sure I would have done that, or not done it quite that way, without Sybil Van Antwerp. There is something about spending time with a character who takes correspondence seriously — who treats it as a form of devotion, a daily practice, a way of being present to the people she loves even when presence is difficult — that makes you want to honor the impulse in yourself. To stop saying I should write to so-and-so and simply write.
Because here is what I keep coming back to, both in the novel and in my own life: a letter is an act of faith.
You write without knowing exactly when it will arrive, or what mood the recipient will be in when they open it, or whether the words will land the way you intended. You send it anyway. You release it. And once it leaves your hands it begins its own life — sitting in a mailbox, carried across a city, tucked into a shoebox, discovered years later at exactly the moment it is needed. My grandmother sent me photographs of her garden and inscribed them with love for a birthday I barely remember. I found them after she was gone, and they are with me still, on my office wall, every day that I do this work.
She could not have known. And yet.
This is what Virginia Evans understands, and what Sybil Van Antwerp embodies despite all her flaws and defenses and decades of carefully managed distance: that the act of writing to someone is itself the thing. Not the perfect word, not the resolved feeling, not the tidy conclusion. Just the sitting down. The choosing of paper. The decision to say you matter to me — in whatever form you can manage, with whatever you have available, even if your hands are anxious and all you have are plain notecards and a pen.
Even if the letter takes forty years to finish.
Even if you are not sure it will be received the way you hope.
You write anyway. Because words, especially those written, are immortal. Because somewhere, in some shoebox, in some frame on some wall, in the hands of someone who needed exactly this at exactly this moment — your love is waiting.
Send the letter.
If you have ever written or received a letter that changed something in you, I would love to hear about it in the comments.