by Carlene Phillips ·
Friday, August 21, 2026
Evann Normandin. (Courtesy photo)
The adage “Third time’s the charm” has proven true for writer Evann Normandin of Old Littleton Road, whose debut novel, “The Good Parts,” has been published recently. During the pandemic Normandin drafted a novel that ended up in a drawer. The second attempt was a book based on a myth that didn’t make it to publication but resulted in her getting a literary agent. Through that agent, whom Normandin said she was very lucky to find, and her own perseverance, “The Good Parts” was published by Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. Her contract is for two books, and she is working on her second novel, due out in the fall of 2027.
Actually, this novel is her fourth piece of fiction. She has been writing since she was a young child and wrote her first book at age 12. Her grandmother was its only reader, but already she had a sense of style, using five viewpoints from which to tell the story. “The Good Parts” has two points of view. In alternating chapters, Rose tells the story of her background and her life with Landon, the boy she meets freshman year in college, while Landon picks up their story where Rose leaves off. Normandin said she had a rough idea of the book when she began and she definitely knew how it would end.
In addition to having a good agent, Normandin had the advantage of being familiar with the infrastructure of publication, as she works in educational publishing. She wrote the draft in six months, being disciplined about writing 1,000 words every day—even with a newborn baby, Theo, who is now two and a half. She said she actually enjoyed the editing process. Her editor sent a fairly lengthy list, mainly suggesting areas that needed more development. Normandin said she agreed with the comments and found it easy to write a few new chapters. The challenge was that since the book is in alternating points of view, it was hard to fit the new material into the existing pattern.
Normandin describes the book as being of the magical realism genre, where you need to have just one magic “tweak” and the rest is realistic. In “The Good Parts,” the tweak is the existence of the forgetting pill, which erases all memory of your life and lets you reset. This allows the author to explore themes of memory, destruction and creation, identity, and more. Normandin majored in English and theater at Middlebury College and received her master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. Her focus was on English and traumatic memory, the theory that the body remembers what the mind doesn’t of traumatic events. This idea plays a large part in the novel.
Normandin described part of the inspiration behind the book. She met her husband, Skylar, in college, but they broke up after graduation. She was becoming immersed in her new life when she received a letter Skylar had written from China, a letter that had taken two months to get to her. On a bike ride a couple of years ago, she was recalling that incident and wondered, “Who would I be if I hadn’t gotten the letter?”
“The Good Parts” begins with Landon receiving a letter from Rose that took three months to get to him. She had left their life together abruptly, and Landon had not known where she went. He determines to go to Edinburgh to find her, believing, “If she fell in love with me once, she can love me again.” From there, the book shifts to Rose, arriving at a small college in Vermont and, in every other chapter, telling the story of falling in love with Landon and the course of their relationship over time. Rose had a difficult several years before she met Landon. Her father is in a facility because of Alzheimer’s and he no longer recognizes her. Her mother, deeply depressed and finding solace in drink, is unable —or unwilling—to take any interest in Rose’s life. With Landon, she feels she finally belongs to someone who cares about her. But when things get traumatic, she makes a choice that changes everything.
In alternating chapters, Landon, whom Normandin describes as “such a golden retriever,” recounts his search for Rose and his attempt to recover what they used to have together. He has to resort to deception, which is unlike his forthright and endearing personality. As this “new” person, he gets close to Rose and is able to confess the guilt and despair he has carried.
The characters, even the lesser ones, are fully developed, and, despite what a reader may wish, their actions are consistent with their backgrounds and who they are. Normandin said it took about one-third of the book to know who her characters were. She said she mined her own memories and experiences to “take on a new life” in the book. The main characters have parts of her and her husband—“they’re us but not.” She has said “her husband inspired the love story (but only the good parts).”
The book is thought-provoking, raising questions about the possibility of erasing your life and reinventing yourself, how people deal differently in response to grief, whether you can ever really recover from trauma, what are different ways to love, and how can one learn to live again. Ultimately, Normandin said, the book is about hope—“There is always hope.”