I will begin by saying that I feel both as if I knew Kent very well and very little.
Sometimes we were like best friends who had been separated at a young age. Or like strangers sharing secret glances across a train. Two people trying to reach each other over an almost impossible distance. Contrary to some reports I’ve seen online, we were never lovers — only intimates drifting in and out of each other’s lives.
Evie of the Deepthorn shares this ambiguity in many respects. Sometimes it felt like it was directed by an intelligence and order that was fully outside either’s understanding, like we were keys working in the other’s lock, moving Evie closer and closer to her final destination. When the final manuscript arrived at my door yesterday, after so many years of sitting in a drawer, I briefly entertained the fantasy that I was receiving a package from a world that was not quite my own, a world which neither of us had ever lived in or ever would.
Friends of mine who read the book long ago asked me, “Is this a ghost story?” And to that the only answer I had was “I don’t know.”
Maybe every story is.
There’s a mystery at the heart of the novel, but the mystery is twofold. We could never quite figure out the influence that Evie of the Deepthorn had on us, the ways in which it seeped into our respective consciousnesses.
We could not quite agree on what it was, either.
The other mystery is the standard one: how to live. I’d be lying if I said I thought we came any closer to figuring that out.
Though Evie is a work of fiction, the events portrayed within are absolutely true, at least in the sense that they felt true to us. Sometimes that might seem hard to believe.
But there is rarely any ambiguity when it comes to the truth, or at least to how the truth feels, which is of course what is most important.
— Sarah Krause