You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:00)
Have you read The Correspondent? Everybody's talking about this book.

**Kate** (0:04)
The Correspondent was one of my favorite books last year.

**Tyler** (0:09)
My goodness, I love this book. I love Sybil and so profoundly good.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:12)
This book pulled itself to the top of the bestsellers list through word of mouth. That does not happen. This is your first published novel, but it's the eighth one you've written, and you wrote this book inside a closet, thinking nobody would ever read it. How did you handle each rejection?

**Virginia Evans** (0:30)
Oh gosh.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:31)
At some point, do you think, well, maybe I'm just not good?

**Virginia Evans** (0:34)
I don't think I ever thought that. Most people have said to me, this book made me cry and it felt so good.

**Oprah Winfrey** (0:44)
Hi there and welcome to the Oprah Podcast. I'm so glad to be here with you.
When you love books as much as I do, you get recommendations, lots of recommendations, and there's one book in particular people kept asking me about, have you read The Correspondent? You got to read The Correspondent. You're going to love The Correspondent. I had no choice but to read The Correspondent and let me tell you, I'm so glad I did because the book tells the life story of Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her 70s like I am living in Maryland. Readers get to know Sybil and all her wonderful complexity entangled past solely through letters and emails that she writes and receives. Sybil writes to family, to friends, to complete strangers. She even writes to famous authors who are really famous authors, even her own neighbors, each note revealing a different strand of the fabric of her life. It's what the literary world calls an epistolary novel composed of letters.
I must say, other than The Color Purple, which was Sealy's Letters to God, I'm not usually drawn to the epistolary form, but this book, The Correspondent, felt different. It felt bigger than one woman's letter writing, and it is obviously bigger because just through word of mouth, this book has put itself on the New York Times bestseller list. That is the goal for every author. It's my pleasure to welcome you here.

**Virginia Evans** (2:17)
Thank you. It's my pleasure.

**Oprah Winfrey** (2:19)
Profound book that everybody's talking about, this book.

**Virginia Evans** (2:23)
Thank you. Thank you. It is my pleasure and honor to be here to talk to you about it. I'm so excited that you read it and that you liked it.

**Oprah Winfrey** (2:30)
Of course. I had to read it because everybody was saying, read it. Writer Virginia Evans had tried for years before finally getting her first book published, The Correspondent. When it was released in April 2025, it sold less than 8,000 copies. Then something remarkable happened. The thousands of people who read it fell in love with it. Then they started recommending it to other people.
And soon word of mouth spread like wildfire. The Correspondent has now sold well over 2 billion copies. A story about a woman in her 70s who in today's digital world still writes handwritten letters became an unexpected number one New York Times bestseller.
Welcome Virginia Evans to my front porch.

**Virginia Evans** (3:14)
Thank you. Thank you.

**Oprah Winfrey** (3:15)
Could you feel or sense what was happening in the zeitgeist that one person was telling another person was because this book sort of pulled itself to the top of the bestsellers list through word of mouth. That does not happen.

**Virginia Evans** (3:28)
That's what everybody keeps telling me. I do think I started to understand that that's what was happening, but I didn't, I'm not sure when that was. I'm not sure how that happened.
I think you're right. It's just one person said to two other people to read it and those two people told two more people.

**Oprah Winfrey** (3:45)
And before you know it, and it was this story. And so before we get into this absolutely, you know, captivating, compelling book, let's talk about you. This is your first published novel.

**Virginia Evans** (3:58)
That's right.

**Oprah Winfrey** (3:59)
Okay. But it's the eighth one you've written. Tell us about your 20 year journey to become an overnight success.

**Virginia Evans** (4:07)
I know it is funny. People said you just came out of nowhere, sort of think, no, I wasn't nowhere.

**Oprah Winfrey** (4:12)
I've been writing for 20 years.

**Virginia Evans** (4:14)
For a long time. Yes. I started writing my first novel when I was 19 I was living in Italy in Siena and I wrote, I started writing a novel there. Then I wrote novels, finish one. It takes a few years.