The book began as a fairly straightforward regional premise in 2018, when Abdurraqib was roughly the same age as LeBron James and had spent much of his life watching James rise through Ohio basketball. The idea sat dormant for four years. What finally broke it open was a video clip watched during the early months of the 2020 lockdown, when Abdurraqib was already wrestling with how the pandemic was distorting time, stretching days into months while whole weeks dissolved.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I was obsessing over LeBron James and mortality. We’re around the same age. We grew up playing basketball in Ohio around the same time. I saw this video of him in early 2020, in the beginning of lockdown, where his beard was grayer than I had ever seen it before.

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esquire.com, “Hanif Abdurraqib On Basketball and ‘There’s Always This Year’”

The envy Abdurraqib felt watching James during his first Cleveland run was not incidental to the project — it was its emotional core. At the time Abdurraqib was unhoused in Columbus, sleeping at one point in a storage unit, while James was becoming one of the most watched athletes on the planet. The pleasure of following his rise and the bitterness of watching it from that particular vantage point were inseparable.

Hanif Abdurraqib

He was making it somewhere. He was making it out of a place when I was definitively kind of not. He had options for exit at a time in my life where I was struggling, quite frankly. And so, you know, it was pleasure and joy, but also some envy, if I’m being honest.

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texasstandard.org, “‘There’s Always This Year’ goes beyond the bounds of basketball”

The spatial reality of that period was specific and, for Abdurraqib, unforgettable. Cavs games were everywhere in Columbus during James’s first years in the league — filling bars, spilling out open restaurant doors — and Abdurraqib was outside all of it, on the sidewalk with no money to buy anything.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I remember very clearly walking through downtown Columbus and just hearing the Cavs games blaring out of open doors to bars or restaurants and things like that, and not having — I couldn’t go in there because I had no money to buy anything.

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National Public Radio, “A conversation with the author of ‘There’s always this year’”

Abdurraqib did not start writing until 2022, and only then did the book reveal what it had actually been about all along. He had expected to write about Ohio, about basketball, maybe about childhood. What arrived on the page was something he had not planned for.

Hanif Abdurraqib

Taking to the writing allowed me to say: ‘Oh. It turns out that I am also — unbeknownst to myself — writing about the passage of time and mortality and the kind of fear that comes with aging and being grateful for that aging, but also being aware of the toll that aging can take.’

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hazlitt.net, “Grief and Devotion on the Three-Point Line: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib”

Before Abdurraqib wrote a single page of the book proper, he used a Paris Review series called ‘Notes on Hoops’ to rebuild his fluency with basketball as a subject. He published four pieces in the series but wrote nearly twice that number, treating the unpublished work as deliberate practice. Once he did turn to the manuscript, his first act was unexpected: he wrote prose poems, not narrative, and he wrote more of them than the book could hold.

Hanif Abdurraqib

Those were the first things I wrote for the book. I wrote 30 of them...And of course, they all didn’t make it. But that was kind of an exercise, like a brain exercise.

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National Public Radio, “A conversation with the author of ‘There’s always this year’”

The structure that frames the book — a countdown clock, the shape of a basketball game divided into pregame, quarters, and overtime — was not conceived all at once. The clock began as a device for one section, imagined as a way to render diminishment: something full at the start, thinning toward nothing. Abdurraqib only realized its scope when that first section was done.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I really wanted to offer people the shape of a basketball game. I don’t think the book is all that much about basketball, but having that physical shape, I think, can convince people that they are in the throes of something that they aren’t necessarily in the throes of day-to-day.

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hazlitt.net, “Grief and Devotion on the Three-Point Line: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib”

The first full draft ran 120,000 words, and Abdurraqib could identify in retrospect exactly what had produced the excess. He had written toward an imagined skeptic — a reader who did not already love basketball — and had weighted the manuscript accordingly. His editors diagnosed the problem differently: the book opened too far back from the personal material that gave it gravity, and they told him to move his teenage self to the front.

Hanif Abdurraqib

So much of the overwriting — I can tell I was just trying to convince people to love basketball instead of listening to what I knew to be true: I was brought to this book by basketball, perhaps, but it’s not a basketball book.

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vulture.com, “Hanif Abdurraqib on His New Book, ‘There’s Always This Year’”

Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, which uses a fragmented, time-bending form to circle a single act of violence and its aftermath, was kept open on a second monitor throughout the writing. Abdurraqib described borrowing from it directly, and the way he framed the relationship makes plain that he thought of Morrison’s presence as something closer to a collaborator than a reference.

Hanif Abdurraqib

Parts of this book are straight up borrowing from Jazz...If I’m writing in my house and I have an excerpt from Jazz up on my computer, then that means Morrison is in the room with me.

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theringer.com, “How Hanif Abdurraqib Learned to Surrender Himself to the Process”

Research also corrected Abdurraqib’s memory in a way that became part of the book’s argument. He had told the story of the final minutes of the 2016 NBA Finals for years as a tense, high-scoring scramble. When he actually rewatched the game, he found the opposite. Rather than treating this as a problem, he folded it into the book’s larger interest in how we construct meaning from sport.

Hanif Abdurraqib

we can sit in the slow moments of a game and build a narrative that suits our dreams, even if we have to go back and watch the game and say, ‘Wait, that’s not how I dreamed it.’ But it’s still miraculous nonetheless.

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texasstandard.org, “‘There’s Always This Year’ goes beyond the bounds of basketball”

Abdurraqib described the finished book’s form in terms that locate it firmly in the tradition of the long poem rather than the essay collection. The prose poems embedded in the text are not ornament. They are part of a single continuous structure, and the surrounding narrative sections obey the same logic of accumulation and variation.

Hanif Abdurraqib

There’s Always This Year is kind of like one long extended poem. There are actual literal poems embedded in the book, but also the book’s structure and form and flow — it’s kind of like multiple long poems kind of weave together. [paraphrased from audio]

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Windham-Campbell Prizes and Literary Festival, “Morning Wake Up with Hanif Abdurraqib”

The shift in subject that Abdurraqib experienced during the writing was not just a discovery about time and mortality in the abstract. It named something specific. He went in expecting to write about a place and a sport; he came out having written about a relationship he had not consciously intended to put on the page.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I thought this would be a book about basketball, or this would be a book about my childhood. But it became a book about place. It became a book about my dad too. A lot of my dad.

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theringer.com, “How Hanif Abdurraqib Learned to Surrender Himself to the Process”

Basketball in the book is never treated as an end in itself. The sport is the material that gives Abdurraqib a way into questions — about mortality, about fatherhood, about what it costs to stay in a place — that would resist more direct treatment. He laid that out plainly when asked what he was ultimately after.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I kind of wanted to make basketball almost a — just a canvas atop which I was laying a lot of other concerns, be it mortality or place or fatherhood and sonhood in my case. I think mostly it’s a book about mortality.

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National Public Radio, “A conversation with the author of ‘There’s always this year’”

The word ‘ascension’ in the subtitle is not meant to invoke dramatic upward flight — the kind of arc that ends with escape from a place and arrival somewhere grander. Abdurraqib spent part of the book rebuilding the term from the ground up, around the players he grew up watching who never left Ohio but whose names still circulate on the courts where they came up.

Hanif Abdurraqib

For me, some of this book was me considering what if I defined ‘ascension’ as just simply moving from the place you dreamed to the place that you are — you know, moving from the place you were to the place that you dreamed. Which happens in smaller increments, I think.

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texasstandard.org, “‘There’s Always This Year’ goes beyond the bounds of basketball”

The countdown clock that runs through the book functions as more than a structural conceit. It puts a direct question to the reader about what they would notice, cherish, or squander if they could watch time move in both directions — fast and slow — within the same few hours. Abdurraqib was explicit about what he wanted readers to feel at the end of it.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I know that I can make, on the page, this book feel both overwhelmingly fast and incredibly slow. And I guess the question I have is, what do you cherish about the time you have? What do you cherish about the time that feels even long and brutal?

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texasstandard.org, “‘There’s Always This Year’ goes beyond the bounds of basketball”

Abdurraqib’s account of his relationship to Morrison is the clearest statement of the book’s own ambition: it names the gap between what you aim at and what you reach, and then insists that the gap is generative rather than defeating. He has said this about Morrison in multiple contexts, but nowhere more directly than in The Ringer.

Hanif Abdurraqib

I’m always reaching for Toni Morrison and failing. But that’s a part of writing. To fail reaching for Toni Morrison is to succeed in a multitude of other ways.

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theringer.com, “How Hanif Abdurraqib Learned to Surrender Himself to the Process”

That posture — reaching toward something you know you cannot fully attain — describes the book’s relationship not just to Morrison but to LeBron, to Columbus, and to the friends and neighborhoods it keeps returning to and never quite resolving.