Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
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Gabrielle Zevin on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A lost game and a generation that grew up with oneThe book’s first seed was not a character or a theme but a failed search. Zevin went looking for a game she remembered from childhood and found it had simply ceased to exist, erased by the hardware it once required to run.
I was looking for a game I had played as a kid, and I couldn’t find the game anywhere. It occurred to me that games, because they are tied to hardware, could be lost. And it got me thinking how games were an important part of my creative development and, in addition to tons of novel reading, were part of the way I had learned about storytelling.
From that personal loss, a generational question opened up. The people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the first to grow old alongside the game industry itself, and Zevin saw a coming-of-age story no one had yet written about them.
What really intrigued me was to write a coming-of-age story about people who would come of age alongside an industry.
She also wanted to contest the hierarchy of love stories. Friendship and creative partnership rarely get the narrative space that romance does, and the novel was her argument against that.
There’s this idea that there’s only one kind of great love story, and usually, you know, it’s romantic love. Friendship is somewhat seen as a lesser kind of love; same for colleagues or work, that this kind of love is not worth discussing.
For the first time, Zevin gave a central character her own biracial background, half-Jewish and half-Korean, though she did not fully recognize she was doing it while she was doing it. The admission she offers about why she had avoided that choice before is the more telling part.
I didn’t think I was doing it, but I didn’t have a faith that people would want to read a story about a half-Jewish, half-Korean artist, which is what I am. And I think the success of me has taught me is that the books I want to read as a reader, and which readers seem to want, are the books that are most reflective of individual experiences.
Nine published novels preceded this one. The willingness to write from her own ethnic identity arrived late, and the book’s reception became its own evidence for why she should have done it sooner.
How she wrote it
Research, formal risk, and reading the opening a thousand timesTo keep the fictional game studio’s output historically plausible, Zevin built a year-by-year map of what the industry was actually producing. Every game Sam and Sadie design had to be possible given what the hardware of its moment could do.
I spent a long time looking at what were the top 20 games of any given year. Just to get a sense of what people were playing and what the games could do at that time.
The novel’s ten sections all carry plural titles except one: “The NPC,” the chapter that follows a character outside Sam and Sadie’s orbit entirely. Zevin knew from early drafts that this section would require a formal gamble, writing it in second person, the mode of early text-based games like Colossal Cave Adventure, where the player is addressed directly. She also knew it would cost her some readers.
I have known that whenever you do anything formally odd, you are likely to lose people, so it really has to work.
Her British editor wanted the section cut. She refused. She revised it more than any other part of the book, and she kept it because the emotional effect depended on the form: the second person that once told players they were standing in a cave is repurposed here to make a character’s death hit at full weight.
The bird image that runs through “The NPC” began as a research detour. Once Zevin decided that Marx’s mother loved William Morris’s Strawberry Thief print (a thrush stealing fruit from a garden), she followed the image through the chapter until the bird became Marx himself. The connection she then noticed on Goodreads made the accumulation feel less accidental.
The Japanese word for strawberry is ‘Ichigo,’ which is also the name of Sam and Sadie’s first game.
Rather than discover Sam and Sadie through the writing, she arrived at the first scene already knowing them. Her stated aim was that both characters feel fully formed from the first page, so the reader never spends a hundred pages waiting for the novel to catch up to its own people. The lockdown conditions of 2020 gave her the concentration to pull that off: she had started the book in 2018 but wrote the bulk of it alone, with a quality of isolation she described as something she had not felt since her debut.
I was able to feel more alone with my work than I had felt since probably my first novel.
Her daily writing practice involves reading from the top of whatever she is working on before adding anything new. The method compounds: by the time she finished the novel, she had passed through its earliest scenes more times than any reader ever will.
Writing became a kind of travel.
All four cities in the book (Los Angeles, Cambridge, New York, Tokyo) are places where Zevin had lived or worked. The lockdown that cut off physical movement pushed the place descriptions into sharper detail than anything in her earlier work, and the novel became, among other things, a record of cities she could no longer visit while writing it.
The personal thread
Always mistaken for a foreignerSam Masur, the novel’s co-protagonist, shares Zevin’s biracial background and, more specifically, her experience of being perpetually misread as an outsider wherever she happened to be. That feeling is the experiential core the character is built on.
So much of Sam comes from my own experience. As a kid, everywhere I went, people were always sure that I was a foreigner. They were always sure that I was not from wherever I was at the time. That’s a strange way to go through life, I suppose.
Nine novels preceded this one, and Zevin has been specific about why this book could not have come earlier: its subject (the arc of a creative life, with its failures and recoveries) required the authority that only accumulation could provide.
This couldn’t have been my debut because I wouldn’t have known enough to write it. So much of this book is about the ups and downs of creative life, success and failures.
The pandemic created one more condition that mattered: writing in genuine solitude, with no sense of audience, she finished the manuscript and told her partner she was indifferent to its reception. “It’s exactly what I wanted to do” is how she described it to Penguin UK. The book’s critical and commercial outcome became something she had not written toward.
On what the book is wrestling with
Connection, failure, and what online life actually costsThe novel refuses to treat gaming as a metaphor for something more serious. Zevin’s argument is structural: for the generation she is writing about, games were not a supplement to storytelling, they were the primary form of it.
Somebody might not understand is that gaming is really another form of storytelling. When I talk about the first generation of people to game their whole lives, I’m talking about the fact that there are people that have experienced gaming as a primary storytelling experience.
The book is set across a period of exploding connectivity, but Zevin’s argument runs against the optimism that connectivity produces closeness. The more channels available, the starker the rarity of actual contact becomes.
This is a book about how rare it can be to truly connect with somebody, in a virtual world or in the real world.
One of the moves the novel makes is refusing a clean border between digital behavior and real identity. What Sam and Sadie do inside their games, and what their players do inside those games, is not safely separate from who they are off-screen.
One of the things I’m saying in the book is that what you do online is real, that it’s still part of you when you do those things.
Where many novels about creative ambition position success as the destination, Zevin inverts the structure. The book’s creative engine runs on failure, and she has explained why she thinks that is the more honest and more generative condition to inhabit.
Failure, instead of success, is a much more creative space to inhabit. When you succeed, you are asked to repeat the thing that you did the first time. When you fail, you — at least hopefully — won’t repeat that exact thing you did before.
What she wants us to sit with
Work marriage, and the love that doesn’t get a genreThe relationship at the book’s center is not a romance, and Zevin is careful to say it is not exactly a friendship either. The term she reaches for when pressed is more precise and more unusual, and it reframes what the novel has actually been about.
It is as just as much a marriage story, but it’s about a work marriage. It’s about two people that make things together. I don’t know that they’re terribly good friends, but what they are is really good collaborators. [paraphrased from audio]
She wrote the book, in part, for anyone who has spent years in the distance between what they can imagine making and what they are yet capable of making. Her advice about that gap is blunt and specifically anti-consolatory.
There’s no other solution to get to writing better books except to write the less good ones first. [paraphrased from audio]
That is not a statement about writing alone. Sam and Sadie spend the novel building games that fall short of what they saw, then building better ones, then losing things they cannot recover. The creative partnership is also a record of what it costs to keep working. Zevin’s hope seems to be that readers leave the book with some tolerance, maybe even appreciation, for the long accumulation that serious making requires.