Virginia Evans

intimate, although in some ways, the letters are intimate, but in some ways, they are intimate at a distance.

You know, there's just something about a letter, which you can be home alone and locked in your castle, and you can still write a letter, but you're still alone, you know, and I think part of the story is

really seeing how in the story, you kind of get a window back into her life to see the way that writing letters have been a part of her life, sort of from the beginning of, you know, she's a very intelligent sort of precocious child.

You, you sort of see a little bit, I mean, it's just little fragments of these things, but you see that letters are something that she found and clung to for how to move through the world and relationships.

And so it's interesting because she,

people have reached out to me following the book to say,

I read your book and I've started writing letters to my children or to my friends or, you know, those kinds of things, which is beautiful.

And I love that.

And I'm a letter writer, but also part of the story is that the letters that she was writing were the tragedy of her life, you know, and there's aspect of the story, which is that she's going blind.

And that's something, you know, from the first page pretty much is that she has this condition that is rendering her blind over time.

And so there is something about that that's terrifying for her because she's such a clinger to the practice of letter writing.

And, you know, what will she do?

How will that impact her life?

And, you know, her journey through the book, which is this kind of decade of her 70s and early 80s,

It's about her life story, but it is also about the letter writing and what that was and what was beautiful and fulfilling about it.

Because some things about it were beautiful and fulfilling, but also what was tragic about it ultimately.

And the way in some ways she needed freedom from it.

The letter writing vehicle of the story was,

probably became something more than I didn't even really know how it was going to be such a mainstay of the story.

I wanted to write a book in letters because I like to read books in letters or different mediums and things like that.