For anyone looking to level up their reading experience, Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow crafts a masterful story about the art of making a video game. And you don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy it.

Speaking with moderator Szilvia Molnar (a fellow author and Zevin’s foreign rights editor) at BookPeople on Monday, April 3, Zevin discussed her 2022 novel, which follows two young aspiring game developers Sadie Green and Sam Masur as they navigate adulthood and their friendship.

Zevin played video games from a young age after being given a “plastic really hot box to solve the problems of solitude.” She learned programming from her computer programmer dad, who she viewed as an author in his own right. She said she felt a clear connection to the storytelling aspect of games and the creation of gaming as a new creative medium. “Video games are an incredibly young art,” she explained. “Within the lifetime of these characters, you could have this whole history of the medium. That was the thing that’s interesting about it, the dovetailing of these two coming-of-age stories.”

While designing Sam and Sadie, Zevin said she focused on why people choose to play games. She also placed pieces of herself in the characters, something she avoided doing in earlier novels. Sam shared her Korean and Jewish background, and said she felt a connection to Sadie’s experiences with sexism in the gaming industry. “I thought of fiction writing as a mask that you could wear, and I wrote people that were as far away from me as possible,” Zevin said. “Over the years, I gradually let that mask slip.”

Zevin, who worked on the book on-and-off since 2018, said the pandemic gave her a “particular freedom” to focus less on her dialogue with readers and more on her personal satisfaction with the book. “If there’s no publishing, if there’s no people, if there’s no readers, if there’s no events and BookPeople, I just want to solve this book. … I want to get these people off this train platform and put them in the world.”

Rather than centering on a romance, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow focuses on the creative partnership of Sam and Sadie. Zevin said that, in some ways, the novel reflects her relationship with her long-term partner, Hans Canosa. “Whatever love happens to make its way like rain into your life, you should be very grateful for. I wanted to tell a story that suggested that there were other versions of life, and I think a lot of us are living versions of that life.”

Zevin ended her talk with an anecdote from a Californian Lyft driver who remarked that reading an article about the multitude of meanings of the word “green” opened his eyes to beauty in the world. “It’s kind of the same job I do in a way,” Zevin said. “I think that’s where humor comes from. I think that’s where love comes from. And I think that’s where writing comes from. It’s about noticing all the people in the world and all the greens.”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin
Knopf, 416 pp., $28

This article appears in March 31 • 2023.

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