“If someone had said, ‘When you are 39, all this will come home to roost,’ it would have made those years so much easier.”
Virginia Evans is speaking from her home in North Carolina about her marathon to publication, a decades-long test of endurance, self-belief and familial support.
You’ve probably seen copies of her first published novel, The Correspondent, in bookshops. It’s an epistolary novel, which is to say told in the form of letters – both sent and unsent, on paper and as emails – and other sorts of written correspondence.
Shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, it has been a consistent presence at the upper end of the Irish fiction charts, selling upwards of 400 copies a week; in the United States it has sold more than 1.5 million copies, and rights have been sold to 41 territories worldwide.
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In many ways the story of how Evans got to publication is both a nightmare and a dream. The dream part is finally seeing her book make it into print, followed by those high sales, uniformly excellent reviews, widespread media attention – including, in the US, from The New York Times’ books podcast, National Public Radio and morning television shows, with their huge audiences – and festival appearances.
Eoin McNamee told me: ‘You are so unwilling to hurt your characters. You have to let them be hurt ... You have to let people do horrible things’
The nightmare bit is the 20-year process of reaching publication. Most people would be horrified at the prospect of willingly writing eight novels only for them disappear into the ether, with no agent, no publisher and no readers for those two decades other than friends and family. At a certain point, do you not just give up and get on with other aspects of your life?
“I wouldn’t fault anyone for not wanting to do it,” Evans says, reflecting on her persistence. “It’s partly to do with the way I’m wired. I never really considered not doing it. I didn’t know anything about publishing. Maybe on book four I thought, How do you ‘print’ your book: I didn’t even have the language for publishing. How do you get published? You need an agent. How do you get an agent?
“I taught myself. I read. I researched. I was trying to figure it out as I went. I’d get to the end of a novel, and the day I would finish it I would go print it off at the library, and I’d know I could do better. And then I would start something new the next day.”
When she wasn’t writing Evans was working several jobs and raising two small children with her husband. Her writing time was in the very early morning, when most people with day jobs are still asleep.
“My son is 13 now, so, starting when he was a baby, I would write before he woke up. I would try to set my alarm for 4.30am and then get up. It seems absolutely mad to me now. I don’t know how I did that, especially with babies.
“It is so exhausting. But I just wanted it so much. My son would wake at 7am, so I would write for those couple of hours before he woke up. Then I would work lots of different jobs from home. I never had childcare help, and I wrote pretty much seven days a week for years.”
What drove her to continue day after day, week after week, year after year?
“The oxygen for me was writing,” Evans says. “I always felt like if I could get up early before everyone else, and I could get my writing in, then anything could happen during the day and I would be okay. If I could carve out that time first, then I could handle any other chaos.”
Evans had a near miss later on with one completed book, where an agent was involved, with a possible sale, but it all fell through.
The catalyst for change was an academic year Evans spent doing a DPhil in creative writing at Trinity College. She applied for writing programmes at Dublin, Manchester and Edinburgh, and was accepted to all three.
“It’s hard to explain how miraculous these acceptances felt,” she says. “I remember getting my acceptance letters. I thought it was all a mistake. At that point our children were two and five. We owned a home, and had jobs, and had a life.”
As Evans was trying to decide which course to choose, her father-in-law became seriously ill.
“He didn’t die, but he was in high-level care, and my husband had to be very involved. We felt it was terminal for our dreams of living abroad. We thought, We can’t leave home. So we called the programmes and we said, This is the situation. Trinity said: ‘We would really love for you to come. What if you deferred for one year?’ And so we said yes.”
[ Virginia Evans on swapping the US rat race for a writing course in IrelandOpens in new window ]
The family of four packed up and moved temporarily to Dublin, supported by staff at the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing.
“Deirdre Madden worked with me hand in hand to figure out how to move my family to Ireland. She emailed me constantly that year, trying to figure out emigration and visas.”
Once Evans arrived in Ireland she immersed herself in the course. Among her teachers were the writers Kevin Power, Claire Keegan, Carlo Gébler and the centre’s director, Eoin McNamee. Each gave her writing advice she still uses, pieces of advice that are surely also useful for anyone interested in trying to write a novel.
“There are little things from each of my professors that stay with me. Kevin Power has this way of thinking where he says that every story is the same story. That there is a person with a problem, and the person who tries to solve the problem fails, and tries to solve the problem and fails, and for the final time when they try to solve the problem, they either succeed or they fail.
“I always think about that. It has been a really helpful tool for me in writing fiction and thinking about fiction.
“Claire Keegan would always say you’re spinning this world when you’re writing fiction. You’re creating this new universe, and you have your reader and you have brought them into your world. I remember her saying, ‘If there ever is a moment when your reader holds their head back and looks around and says, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and breaks the magic of the world you have created, then you have lost the whole thing.’"
“Eoin McNamee was my overseer, and my mentor for my thesis. We were working on my novel, and I remember him saying to me one time, ‘You have such good command of language and cadence, and your work is so distilled. And these are good things to have.
‘But you are so unwilling to hurt your characters. You have to let them be hurt. You’re not here to be the judge of their decisions. You’re just there to be the storyteller. You have to let people do horrible things.’
“And that comes into my novel The Correspondent. That was so helpful for me.
“Carlo Gébler has been instrumental in my life as a writer since Trinity. We stay in contact. He taught us that you have to mine yourself for what you will use for your work. He was always teaching us to go deeper and deeper and deeper into our own selves.”
Evans wrote a novel as part of her course work at Trinity that year. It was not The Correspondent. She wrote that book in less than a year when she returned to the US from Ireland, after a stay cut short by the pandemic.
The Correspondent focuses on the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, who is 73 and meditating on her life. She has several correspondents, and her relationships and life choices are gradually revealed through the associated letters, emails and notes, both sent and unsent.
Evans herself corresponds with several writers, including Ann Patchett – who, in a meta twist, features in the novel, and now stocks Evans’s book in her real-life bookshop, Parnassus, in Nashville. Patchett’s endorsement – “A cause for celebration” – is also on the cover of the fictional book in which she appears as her real-life character.
“The day the book came out – April 29th, 2025 – I felt this overwhelming feeling of relief,” Evans says.
As The Correspondent sold more and more copies, she signed a deal for the book to be made into a movie, starring and produced by Jane Fonda. The novel Evans wrote after The Correspondent, about the making of a movie, has also been sold; it’s due for publication in 2028.
Why does she think readers have engaged with The Correspondent so widely?
“I think the epistolary thing, with the letters structure, makes for a very accessible read. There are lots of page breaks, so it’s a gentle reading experience. There are short spurts of storytelling.
“I think the material of Sybil’s story is so heavy and dense, and full of all the things that life is full of – which is joy and sorrow. The general feedback that I get is that everybody who read the book says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly is how I feel,’ relating to some aspect of the story.
“It is a simple story. Horrible things happen, but horrible things happen to everyone.”
What advice does Evans have for aspiring writers?
“I would say you have to have courage to keep going. If you are a writer and you feel hounded by this thing, which is telling stories, then that means you should be writing.
“You just have to go with courage into it. It’s not an easy process, and you have to take a lot of hits, but everyone in this industry is taking a lot of hits. You’re not alone. Rejection is tough, but you have to wake up the next day and keep going.”
The Correspondent is published by Michael Joseph; the paperback edition is due to be published by Penguin on June 11th
