Virginia Evans's debut novel is told entirely through the letters of Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her seventies living in Maryland, and its premise is that a life can be read, and perhaps finally understood, through the correspondence a person sends into the world. Sybil is formidable, prickly and funny. Each morning she sits down to write: to her brother, to old friends, to her adult children, to a university official who will not let her audit a course, to authors such as Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry whose books she has opinions about, and to strangers who cross her path. Through these letters, spanning several years, the shape of her past slowly comes into view: a long and difficult marriage that ended in divorce, a career built in a profession that did not welcome women, a strained relationship with her daughter, and a grief she has never fully faced. Another thread runs through the book, a letter she writes again and again and never sends. When she receives letters from someone connected to the most painful episode of her life, Sybil must decide whether she can offer forgiveness, and whether she can let others see the person behind her composure. Meanwhile her eyesight is failing, which lends urgency to her reckoning. The epistolary form lets Evans show how people present themselves differently to different correspondents, and how small acts of attention and kindness accumulate into a life. The novel became an unexpected word-of-mouth success, and it is a tender, intelligent book about aging, regret, friendship and the consolations of reading and writing.