Spoilers And The Short Answer
Today it’s The Correspondent book summary and the ending explained, and I should warn you that this video spoils the entire novel. If you haven’t read it, my spoiler free review comes first.
Quick content note: this summary covers the death of a child, a teenager’s suicide attempt, cancer and the Holocaust. Take care of yourself and pause when you need. I’ll go in order of the letters, year by year, then explain the ending.
So, how does it end? Sybil Van Antwerp dies suddenly at home in Maryland in November twenty twenty one, after a late flowering of friendship, family and travel. The book closes on a letter to her ex husband that she never sent, which hints at the truth about how her young son died.
Twenty Twelve And Thirteen
The story opens in June twenty twelve. Sybil, seventy three, a retired court clerk living near Annapolis, wrecks her car after a blackout and decides it is the start of the blindness her doctor has predicted. Her daughter Fiona, hearing of the crash from London, pushes her to move into a retirement village near Bruce, and Sybil refuses. She tells only a few people about her eyes, and she writes a long unsent page to someone she calls Colt.
That summer her old judge, Guy Donnelly, dies. A newspaper column asks what happened to his famous clerk. She writes the columnist a furious private reply, and the column is also read by an anonymous writer signing only DM, who sends hostile letters.
In February twenty thirteen she gives the eulogy at Guy’s funeral, and a Texas lawyer named Mick Watts, moved by it, invites her to dinner. She refuses, in a letter that explains why she writes letters at all.
Twenty Thirteen To Fifteen
Next comes the DNA test. Her son Bruce gave her a Kindred membership for Christmas, and she resented it. She phones customer service and ends up emailing Basam, a Syrian engineer, and those emails turn into a friendship. She sends in her sample in December twenty fourteen.
Meanwhile DM drives past her house, and she keeps it from her children. In twenty fourteen she also runs over her neighbor Theodore Lübeck’s cat, and the two begin a slow, polite friendship.
In May twenty fifteen her ex husband Daan, dying of cancer in Belgium, writes her a long, tender letter asking forgiveness for blaming her after the death of their son Gilbert. She cannot answer it. Then, drinking rum, she accidentally ticks the box that lets Kindred match her to relatives.
Daan’s Death And The Rift
The match arrives in June twenty fifteen: a woman named Henrietta Gleason, who shares forty nine percent of her DNA. Sybil panics, then tries to message her, but the account is suspended.
In September Daan dies. Sybil buys a ticket for his funeral in Belgium and, at the last minute, does not go. Fiona, her daughter, writes an angry email. Weeks later a Belgian lawyer writes that Daan left Sybil a sizable sum in his will. That December Fiona visits Rosalie in Connecticut, and Rosalie keeps it secret.
In February twenty sixteen Sybil breaks her wrist when Theodore startles her on the river path, and he drives her to the hospital. That moment turns neighbors into friends. Basam is fired from Kindred over their emails. In April, Rosalie confesses the Fiona visit, and the hurt festers for more than a year.
Harry And Hattie
All through the book Sybil exchanges monthly letters with Harry Landy, the son of a judge she once took under her wing. Back in October twenty fourteen he ran away from Washington and walked all the way to her door with his dog. In July twenty sixteen she learns that Harry tried to end his life. In September he comes to live with her, and he stays until May.
Harry finds Hattie’s address online, and in January twenty seventeen Sybil writes to her. Hattie, a botanist in Fort William, Scotland, answers months later, as a skeptic who calls it a possible hoax. She asks to see the lab report, checks with a geneticist, and then sends photographs of her brothers Declan, John and Douglas. Their mother, Louisa, is Sybil’s birth mother. Their father, Charlie Thorne, died in a cattle stampede in Montana.
Spring brings a nasty moment: someone cuts every bloom in her garden. And on her birthday, Theodore tells the story of the day his family fled Germany, May twenty ninth, nineteen forty one. His father and brother died at Dachau.
Dezi
The anonymous letters were from Dezi Martinelli, the son of a man Judge Donnelly had sentenced to prison. After Harry helps find his address, Sybil invites him to say his piece, and he writes of his mother begging in the judge’s chambers.
In January twenty eighteen Sybil confesses. She had lost her own son weeks before the hearing, she hated his mother for still having two healthy boys, and she stayed silent while Guy sentenced Enzo. Later she wrote to Enzo in prison, and he answered with kindness.
Dezi replies that his father died when Dezi was fifteen, and that he now runs a sandwich shop in Hoboken, New Jersey. Sybil writes to his mother, Florencia, in Italy, and apologizes. It cannot undo anything, but it closes a door she had left open for decades.
Side Plots
There are smaller threads that make the book breathe. Sybil is removed as secretary of her garden club. She battles the dean of the University of Maryland English department for the right to audit a class, and the two end up laughing over wine and becoming friends.
Her brother Felix breaks with his partner Stewart over a suspected affair, and they reconcile later. A schoolgirl named Caroline interviews Sybil for a paper and asks her to write a real letter. And Sybil writes a heartfelt fan letter to Larry McMurtry about Lonesome Dove.
It all matters because the book is saying that a life is made of small exchanges, and that nearly everyone writes back.
Repairs In Twenty Eighteen And Nineteen
Now the repairs. In September twenty eighteen, after a disastrous phone call, Sybil writes Fiona the honest letter of her life, explaining adoption, grief and fear, and she writes Rosalie an apology. The relationships begin to heal.
Mick, meanwhile, proposes formally. Sybil, who has no wish to remarry, ends it. She invites Theodore to Paris, and in April twenty nineteen, at seventy nine, she flies to London for the first time, then up to Scotland with Fiona, who plans a route through Oxford and the Yorkshire moors.
At Hattie’s house she meets her brothers, and she finally writes the letter she has avoided for decades. It is addressed to Theodore.
The Truth About Gilbert
Here is what happened. In the summer of nineteen seventy three, Sybil took her children to a lake in Canada. She was working on a case file on the dock when eight year old Gilbert asked her to watch his dive. She did not look up. She told him to jump, calling him Colt, her nickname for him.
He climbed a boulder and dived into shallow water, and his neck broke. She never told Daan what she had done, though he blamed her anyway, and she has believed ever since that it ended their marriage.
Writing it to Theodore, she finally feels quiet inside. Then she asks him to move in with her. In the later letters, they are living together.
The Last Pages
Her sight is nearly gone now. In May twenty nineteen she writes her last page to Colt, on her eightieth birthday. She tells him she got every moment of him there was, and that she is finished writing.
After that, Theodore reads and transcribes for her. They go to Paris in September, where she weeps in Sainte Chapelle, and then they spend long months in Scotland, with Fiona’s family and Felix and Stewart visiting. Harry sends his first draft of a novel, Dynasty of Sight.
In November twenty twenty one, Sybil dies of a pulmonary embolism at her desk, with a cold cup of tea beside her, on what would have been Gilbert’s fifty seventh birthday. Theodore writes to Hattie.
The Ending Explained
So what does the ending mean? After Sybil’s death the last pages are written by the people she loved, which feels like the mail finally answering her. First, the money. Fiona tells Dezi that Sybil left him a sum, and that it really came from Fiona’s father, Daan, to help Dezi’s son. It is her last act of repair from the estate Daan left her.
Second, the final letter. Theodore finds a draft to Daan hidden in a copy of Rebecca, and sends it to Fiona. It is the letter Sybil could not finish. It shows she was trying to tell him, and it gives Fiona an opening for the conversation her mother never managed.
Third, the title. Sybil spent her life writing to people who answered, and the book ends with the reader holding the one letter that never reached its reader. That, to me, is the point: some letters are for ourselves.
Fourth, the stones. Sybil and Harry use that word for secrets, and Daan says he kept hers. In the last pages we see the heaviest stone of all, the one she told Theodore, but never Daan.
Questions Answered
A few quick answers. Who is DM? Dezi Martinelli. Who was Colt? Gilbert. Is Hattie really her sister? Yes, a DNA match of forty nine percent, and the photos agree.
Where does it happen? Mostly near Annapolis, with trips to Scotland, Paris and London. How many letters? About one hundred and sixty. Did Sybil go blind? Nearly, yes, and the book never says exactly what her condition is. Does she marry? No. Who is with her at the end? Theodore, who comes back to find her.
My take, and this is opinion, is that the ending is honest rather than tidy. Sybil repairs nearly everything but never gets to say it all to Daan. For more, see the review and the book club questions, and the full guide at bookexplained dot com. Tell me in the comments which letter hit you hardest.
