MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
OK, question. When was the last time you wrote someone a letter? Like a real letter - an actual letter, pen to paper, licking the envelope, slipping it into a mailbox. Well, a novel from last year is inspiring people to do just that. Here to tell us more is NPR's book correspondent Andrew Limbong. Hey, Andrew.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Tell us about the novel.
LIMBONG: All right. It's called "The Correspondent," and it's by Virginia Evans. I think it's fair to call this the sleeper hit of 2025. Evans is a debut novelist, and this book is about a woman in her 70s named Sybil. And you learn about her through the letters she writes. It's an epistolary novel, right?
KELLY: Right.
LIMBONG: And so she's writing to her friends, to her kids, to people from her past, to complete strangers and, you know, famous writers she admires. And you get this, like, rich description of a person. You read the book, right, Mary Louise?
KELLY: I have, indeed.
LIMBONG: What'd you think of Sybil?
KELLY: I loved her. She's cranky. She's a little uptight. But who amongst us isn't occasionally...
LIMBONG: Right.
KELLY: ...Cranky and a little uptight. I think I loved her because, as you said, she's in her 70s. She's divorced. She's retired. She's the kind of person you might write off as, like, oh, you know, the biggest adventures in life are behind her. And she so proves you wrong, and you're totally rooting for her.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KELLY: OK, so you wrote about her. I know you did a little bit of a shoutout for NPR Books Newsletter.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KELLY: A lot of other people liked - are loving this book, too.
LIMBONG: Yeah. I was trying to really figure out why this book was such a hit. What made the book tick? And I was, you know, writing to the newsletter readers, and I just got this deluge of emails back being like, oh, I loved it. You know, I read it in book club, and everybody there loved it.
KELLY: I read it in book club.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KELLY: And most of us loved it. Go on.
LIMBONG: But an interesting trend I found from the responses were people who were saying, this book influenced me to start writing letters myself. This book got me to, like - you know, they were reading the letters that Sybil was writing, and they're like, I want to do just that. I want to shoutout one person who wrote in. Her name is Carly Bassett (ph). She's a therapist based out of Austin. She finished 'The Correspondent" on New Year's Eve. And at first, she was just inspired to take on a personal challenge to write 26 letters in 2026, right? But then she wanted to connect with people and share in this experience of writing letters. So she started a group to do just that. It's called the Correspondence Course, and they just had their first meeting last week.
CARLY BASSETT: We were able to just have this really cool conversation around the nostalgia of letter writing and the memories and that connection to childhood and grandparents and past lovers and pen pals. And there was just something childlike about kind of seeing that excitement.
LIMBONG: She told me that a big part of their discussion was getting over some of the barriers to letter writing, right? And, you know, she's a therapist, and I thought the barriers she was getting at were like, oh, it's hard to be vulnerable writing a letter.
KELLY: Yeah.
LIMBONG: It's hard to figure out what to write about. But here's what she told me.
BASSETT: The most interesting barrier, and I've seen this in my work with clients and young people, people don't know where to get stamps.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: OK. The post office, people.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KELLY: You can do this.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
KELLY: Or online, like everything else.
LIMBONG: Also - 78 cents a pop now these days. I was like, OK, all right, that's a little...
KELLY: Fair fair fair. OK. Do we know how many people are following Carly's lead, how many people might be taking inspiration...
LIMBONG: As a whole...
KELLY: ...In writing?
LIMBONG: Yeah, I mean, that's hard to say. Anecdotally, I've heard - word on the street is that the stationary section at bookstores has been getting a lot more traction than usual. But, you know, listen, according to Circana BookScan, this book has sold nearly 300,000 print copies.
KELLY: That's a lot.
LIMBONG: So we're not talking audiobook. We're not talking e-book. We're not talking library loans. And so if even just a portion of the people who have read this book start picking up a pen and writing a letter, that's a decent bump.
KELLY: I am heading to order stationery even as we speak. Andrew Limbong, thank you.
LIMBONG: Thanks a lot, Mary Louise.
KELLY: The book is "The Correspondent." And you can find the NPR Books Newsletter that he mentioned at npr.org/newsletter/books. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
