Virginia Evans

She's very blunt.

She's very direct.

She's very smart.

You know, she's very opinionated.

And that whole package of who she was arrived sort of on my shoulder.

And then I felt it was...

Fairly natural for me to get into the river of her thinking and speaking and writing as I was writing the book.

And I think part of that is probably because I have spent my lifetime enjoying and...

valuing relationships with older people you know people in my family and people I've worked for and worked with and people I've met along the way I've always found that having relationships with people older than me has been really valuable and something I've enjoyed so much during my life I've been that way since I was a child I've just always really enjoyed

having relationships with people older than me.

And so I think almost data gathering, I think maybe as novelists, we're sort of always data gathering or story gathering or, you know, moving through the world in this way of acquiring tidbits of thought or life experience or story, throwing them into this big pit of inside of us.

And then when you

go to write a novel or a story you're sort of pulling out of the pit what's down there what do i have what can work in this story and so she really did feel accessible to me i did meet a woman around the time i was starting to think about writing a new novel who sparked the idea of sybil i met this woman i was trying to buy her house and so i went to her house to kind of she took me on a tour of her house and it was a sort of first idea of

you walk into someone's house and you have this experience of saying, oh, I had no idea, you know, what's on their walls and what pictures and what, you know, things they have.

That was part of it.

And, you know, when I was pulling some of Sybil's thoughts together, sometimes I would lean into my mother-in-law and she has a similar kind of disposition and personality to Sybil in a great way.

I'm very close with her.

And so that is a relationship that is

strong and big in my life.

And so I was able to kind of pull from that, you know, sometimes I would think, what would Joyce say?