Kathy Page was inspired to write her latest book after discovering the love letters her father wrote to her mother while serving in the Second World War.
The author and VIU professor read through those missives for the first time about 10 years ago, when her mother unearthed them while house cleaning. At that point her parents had drifted apart, but Page was struck by what the letters said about the trajectory of their 70-year relationship.
“Obviously, it was very poignant and the present was difficult to resign yourself to, the difficulties they were having in the end,” Page said of reading the letters.
“But on the other hand, it was very comforting to me, actually, to see that [their relationship] began how it did – With love.”
Page typed the letters to make them more legible and ended up with 200 pages of writings spanning from around 1942 to 1946. They included historical details about the war but their main function was maintaining a long-distance relationship.
With her father’s permission and her sisters’ blessings she drew from those letters while writing her new book, Dear Evelyn, released this earlier this month. The book tells the story of a couple’s lifelong relationship – including a period during the Second World War when they communicate through mail – and how that relationship changes over time.
“It was quite interesting to try and think as a fiction writer, though also as a daughter, how you got from one stage to the other,” Page said.
“Eventually I was so haunted by this, and by then my parents were beyond answering any questions I had, and probably would not have answered them anyway. I set myself the task of wrenching it away from the actual people concerned, a little bit, but not that much, and trying to imagine my way through that arc of change.”
It’s taken Page more than six years on-and-off to write the book. One difficulty, she said, was making the story her own, rather than her parents’ story. While the characters felt “closer to home,” they were still only characters.
“Part of that length of time was the struggle to get it away from reality and start to feel that they were characters and that I could do what I wanted with them rather than worry about offending anyone or feel I had to stick to what happened and feel trapped by it,” she said.
“So I think it just took me a bit of time to get through to the way to do it.”
While the story is fiction, Page said she chose not to embellish the tale too much, instead aiming to keep it a lifelike commemoration of what people go through in a long relationship, challenges and all.
“I do think that most people’s relationships are flawed and imperfect and unfair and it’s very rare that you get the kind of textbook of reciprocity and equality all the usual things that we perhaps think would be a good idea but not that often reflected full in actual lived life,” she said.
“So I wanted to sort of resolutely stick with that and show this very difficult relationship, but one that nonetheless occupied both people for their whole adult lives.”
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