“Moving through the world as a writer is, I think, an experience of moving through the world with your eyes open to observe.

Charlie Lovett: The Correspondent is one of my favorite forms of novel or storytelling. It is epistolary. My father taught eighteenth century literature, and the eighteenth-century people wrote epistolary novels. People wrote letters. I don’t do much letter writing anymore, sadly, but letter writing was a big part of my life. There’s somebody sitting in the audience who’s here because we wrote letters back and forth to each other. So tell me, why did you decide on writing an epistolary novel? And does letter writing play a role, or has it played a role, in your life?

Virginia Evans: The letter writing was my first step into this book. That’s where I started. It didn’t start with the story of the main character, Sybil. I read a book with my book club called 84, Charing Cross Road. That book is written in letters, and it’s about an academic researcher in New York City, [who needs] this one specific type of material that’s only carried by this very small store found at 84, Charing Cross Road in London. And so [the writers created] this friendship over, I would say, twenty-five years, that these letters span. They’re just these short little back-and-forths [that] hinge on her research. But it’s really this unbelievable way of telling the story of two people’s lives over time in the subtlest shadows of what they mention in these letters.