This will likely be in my top 5 books of 2025. I loved this epistolary novel in which we come to know Sybil Van Antwerp through a plethora of correspondence–with her best friend, her brother, her garden club, her neighbor, a customer support representative, a friend’s troubled son, a Dean at University of Maryland, her adult children, various authors, and many other people in her life. 

Three of four mornings a week, after completing house chores, she sits at her desk “straightens the stack of letter-writing paper, arranges the pens in the mug, counts her stamps, consults the stack of letters she has received and not yet answered, looks at the list of letters she means to write, and a letter she’s been writing for years now, still unsent.”

Perhaps this book gripped me from page one because I too was a prolific letter writer, always feeling as if I can get my thoughts more clear on paper than anywhere else. Today my correspondence is largely emails, texts, hand-written notes, book reviews, and bits and pieces of essays more than letters, but letters were my start. I can pour out coherent, complex ideas with written words far more fluidly than spoken ones. And there’s always been something therapeutic about writing–or typing–my thoughts on a page, even if no one else reads it. Writing clarifies my emotions and ideas and rewriting clarifies them even further.

So to learn a character’s life story through written correspondence felt utterly natural to me, and at 73, Sybil has a lot to say, whether she’s arguing with her garden club’s change of venue or she’s apologizing to a former client about a terrible decision she once made or she’s trying to repair a strained relationship with her daughter. What we see is a bold, sassy woman who finally comes to terms with life-long grief and the way her suppression of emotion has shaped her. 

She’s a bit like Oliver Kitteridge or Lillian Boxfish in her pluckiness and independence, but over the course of the novel (from age 73 to mid 80s), she becomes the person she wants to be–honest, apologetic, happy, less defensive, less guilt ridden, and less grief ridden. 

To witness this growth in a septuagenarian gives me hope for myself and others: we are all learning and growing and coming into our true selves as life ticks along. Wisdom comes with age and experience–and forgiveness and kindness become ever more important.