{"id":8336,"date":"2026-01-16T08:05:25","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T13:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/?p=8336"},"modified":"2026-01-16T08:05:25","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T13:05:25","slug":"the-correspondent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2026\/01\/the-correspondent\/","title":{"rendered":"The Correspondent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>By Virginia Evans \u2013 <\/b><b><i>Crown<\/i><\/b><b>, <\/b><b><i>2025<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sybil Van Antwerp is a woman in her 70s who writes letters at 10:30 most mornings to help her make sense of the world. She writes to her brother, her best friend and even to authors like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. And there&#8217;s one person she writes to over and over again\u2014but those letters never leave her desk.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sybil\u2019s been a lawyer, a mother, a wife, a divorcee and now a grandmother, and she carries all those lives with her in a way that feels real and lived-in. She\u2019s the kind of woman who still wants to learn new things (even if it means pushing back against a university that won\u2019t let her audit a class) and who doesn\u2019t mind speaking her mind\u2014though she usually does it on the page, in her letters. When Sybil starts receiving letters from someone in her past, she\u2019s forced to revisit a painful chapter of her life that she\u2019s tried to set aside. At the heart of this novel is forgiveness\u2014not in a sweeping or sentimental way, but the kind that happens slowly, through reflection, honesty and, eventually, by choice.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sybil Van Antwerp is a woman in her 70s who writes letters at 10:30 most mornings to help her make sense of the world. <\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2026\/01\/the-correspondent\/\">Read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Correspondent<\/span><span class=\"meta-nav\"> &#8250;<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":8337,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12,59,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-fiction","category-friendships","category-midlife-crossings"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"","source_text":"","source_url":""},"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8338,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8336\/revisions\/8338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}