Two Books That Wrecked Me in the Best Way While Painting

One of the real gifts of my painting process is that I get to devour books on tape, or what we used to call books on tape. These days I stream them on Audible, but the pleasure is the same. That’s how I came to these two books.

These two books came to me in different ways. I learned of Amy Bloom’s In Love through my friend Nicole. We were having lunch at Skip, the soup kitchen in Provincetown, when the conversation turned to Alzheimer’s. She mentioned she had read Amy’s book and thought it would move me. She wasn’t wrong. I listen to all my books on Audible. I’m a subscriber. Much like Spotify, Audible tracks your listening history and serves up recommendations based on what you’ve read. That’s how I tripped on The Correspondent. I read the synopsis, saw how many people had loved it, and decided to take the leap. What a leap it was.

They arrived back to back, and yet they felt inevitable together. Two books about women facing the end of things, about the choices we make when love and loss collide, and about how much we can matter to one another even when we are deeply flawed.

In Love — Amy Bloom

https://www.audible.com/pd/059355597X?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow

Amy Bloom’s In Love is one of the most quietly devastating books I have ever read. It is a memoir, not a novel, and that matters because what Bloom recounts actually happened. Her husband Brian was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Together they made the decision to travel to Switzerland so that he could die on his own terms, before the disease could take him piece by piece.

At its core, this is a love story. The deepest act of love in this book is not the marriage or the years together. It is the willingness to honor another person’s wishes about their own life, even when it costs you everything.

The questions it raises stayed with me. What would we do, if it were us? I couldn’t step outside my own life as I listened. I am watching my mother disappear. Slowly, and then less slowly. A woman who was so fully herself, now lost somewhere inside herself. Could she have imagined this, being in her home with round-the-clock care, lost in her own thoughts, not communicating? It’s horrible. Devastating to watch. You have to wonder what it’s all for. Had I been in a position to show her a videotape of what her life would become, would she have made other choices? Would she have preferred Switzerland?

But the book also did something else to me. It made me feel an intense love for my husband. Listening to Amy describe the horror of imagining life without Brian, I found myself imagining my own version of that loss. A life where he is no longer at my side. It is an unbearable thought. And yet sitting with it, even briefly, made me grateful in a way that is hard to articulate. That is what this book does. It shakes you awake.

Bloom doesn’t answer these questions for us. She just shows us what love looks like when it refuses to look away. No false comfort. Just two people, clear-eyed and heartbroken, choosing dignity over drift.

The Correspondent — Virginia Evans

https://www.audible.com/pd/B0DG3SGZYN?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow

Then came Sybil. Virginia Evans’ debut novel The Correspondent unfolds entirely through letters, decades of them, written by a retired lawyer named Sybil Van Antwerp, who has spent her life reaching out to the world one envelope at a time. To her brother, her best friend, to authors she admires, to strangers who moved her. And to one mysterious recipient whose letters she writes but never sends.

Sybil is not always easy to like. She is sharp-tongued and gets in her own way, particularly with the people she loves most. But that is exactly what makes her so compelling. Evans shows us how a person can be difficult and generous at the same time, and how those two things can coexist in a single life.

What moved me most was the texture of Sybil’s generosity. It isn’t grand or performative. It’s the generosity of attention, writing to a teenage boy who needed a caring voice, taking time with people who had been overlooked, saying the thing that needed to be said. Her letters are a quiet devotion to the people around her. And reading them made me think about all the people who have touched my life over the years in ways they could never have imagined. Teachers, friends, strangers who said the right thing at the right moment. People who will never know what they meant to me.

And then I started wondering whether there was still time for me to do the same for others. To make that kind of impact. To reach out, show up, say the thing. Because that is what Sybil teaches you, that a gesture doesn’t have to be enormous to be meaningful. It can be a letter. It can be lunch. It can be a book recommendation from a friend at a soup kitchen in Provincetown. You may never know what it meant to the person who received it. But it matters. It always matters.

There is grief in this book too, loss sewn into almost every letter, accumulating quietly across the years. Sybil has buried people. She carries regret the way we all carry regret. But the novel is also funny, and that balance is one of Evans’ greatest gifts. Grief and laughter are not opposites. They are often the same room.

What These Books Share

Reading them back to back, I kept finding the connection between them. Both are about women, one real, one fictional, who love fiercely and imperfectly. Both are about facing the end of things: a mind, a life, a version of yourself you thought you knew. Both ask what courage looks like when it is quiet and private, when it happens not on a stage but behind closed doors.

And both are, beneath everything, about kindness. Not kindness as politeness, but kindness as paying real attention to other people. Amy Bloom honoring her husband’s wishes. Sybil showing up for a lonely teenager. A person can change someone’s life not through big gestures, but by simply showing up, in person, in a letter, or by sitting beside someone while they lose their way.

Both left me thinking about the people I love who are slowly becoming unreachable. About what it means to witness someone’s disappearance and keep loving them anyway. About whether the love still means something even when they can no longer receive it.

I think it does. I think that’s what both of these books are saying.

A Gift That Comes While Painting

There is something about painting with a wax stylus and streaming a book at the same time that I find hard to explain. Your hands are busy, your mind is open, and stories get in differently. You can’t stop to analyze. You just receive it, and keep painting, and carry it with you.

What these two books left me with is something I’m still working through, about my mother, about my husband, about the people who shaped me and the people I still hope to reach. About love in all its forms, and how little time we spend telling each other what we mean to one another.

Maybe that’s the real lesson. Don’t wait. Write the letter. Make the call. Show up for lunch. You may never know what it means to the person on the other side. But it will mean something. It always does.

If you haven’t read In Love by Amy Bloom or The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, I can’t recommend them enough. Read them close together if you can. They have a lot to say to each other.