Poured Over: Gabrielle Zevin on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“I never thought I would be writing something where there would be a lot of intricate feelings around the game engine. But then if you think about something like say, like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, who would think that you could feel so much passion over whether like, they go to that dance together, you know?” Gabrielle Zevin’s delightful new novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is part love story, part coming of age and entirely unforgettable—which is why it’s our July B&N Book Club pick. Gabrielle joins us on the show for a spoiler-free conversation about her latest book, from the parallels between writing novels and video games, to Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, money and class, creativity, friendship and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.
Featured Books (episode)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
The Nix by Nathan Hill
Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays, here and on your favorite podcast app.
Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:
B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over. And Gabrielle Zevin’s tenth book is out now. It’s our July B&N Book Club pick. And you guys, this book is amazing. And honestly, even if you’re not a gamer, I do not want you to fear this book. This is a great story. It is a love story. It’s a love triangle. It’s all sorts of good stuff. It’s a coming of age for multiple characters. It’s very cool. It’s called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Gabrielle, thank you so much for joining us on the show. How did this book start for you?
Gabrielle Zevin: You know, it’s funny, I feel like almost jealous of authors who have really simple answers to that question. You know, I always wanted to be J.K. Rowling, and just say I came up with all of Hogwarts on the train ride, but for me, I never really have one idea that is like the thing that’s the whole thing. I feel like my novels are more a reflection of sort of where I am in my life, and the existential dilemmas and questions I’m facing at that time—and then there was a novel. But for me, a thing that they don’t really tell you when you become a novelist is that it’s going to forever change your relationship to books. So, I think that I started this novel about five years ago. I guess I’ll set the scene: My ninth novel had just come out, and it did less well than the eighth novel, and I think there’s a part in the book where Sadie describes the fact that when she had made Ichigo, she thought she would never fail ever again. And I’ve had that experience multiple times where I’m like, I have arrived, and I think we’re kind of taught to believe that careers are going to be like, up and up and up, both business-wise and creatively, but in fact, they’re not. And so my ninth novel did less well than my eighth novel. And there’s an extent to which I felt bad about that, and all I wanted to do with retreat into reading, like Elena Ferrante forever and playing games of my youth. So, I found myself tracking down this old game I had played probably as a, you know, 12-year-old, it’s called Gold Rush. And it’s about these two people that are trying to get to the West Coast to exploit the land to get gold basically. And so I try it, you know, it’s basically by the Gold Rush. And you could have probably extracted that from the title. And I tried to track down this game, but really, it was nowhere. And there was some versions of it that I couldn’t play on my computer. And then it got me, researching down the line of the history of Sierra Games, which was the company that made this game and it was turned out that was a husband and a wife. And then I just started thinking about the first generation of people who had experienced games and had played games their entire lives; we kind of call that the Xennial generation or the Oregon Trail generation. So it’s like a microgeneration that’s in between Gen X and Millennial, which I fall into. And I thought that was interesting just to think about what it was to have games as a formative storytelling experience. And that kind of led me down the path of thinking, I think I would love to write the story of these two artists, a Künstlerroman. Those have always been kind of my favorite sorts of novels, actually, that was about the two artists and they’re coming of age that mirrored the coming of age of an industry as well. So that’s kind of where the idea came from.
B&N: Okay, so we have three main characters. We have Sadie Green, and we have Sam Mazur. And then we have Marx Watanabe, and they become Unfair Games. But you have Sadie and Sam meet, in possibly the ultimate meet cute moment. And I say that as someone who’s seen a lot of movies where people meet cute. So let’s talk about how Sadie and Sam meet, and then we’ll bring Marx into the picture. But they’re, these three are, they are everything to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
GZ: You know, it’s funny, I wanted to come up with a place for two characters to meet that didn’t necessarily share class or background, you know, and I think a great equalizer is a hospital, you know. So these two characters, Sam is there because he has a devastating injury, which I won’t really describe how he got, and Sadie’s there because her sister has cancer. And so the strange, just great unifying place of the hospital for all of us—it’s an equalizer across money, people will get sick, bodies will fail. Yeah, so the first place they meet is a place where around them, everyone is sick, and everyone is dying. So perhaps it makes sense that both of them are so drawn to making video games, and I think I think it’s destiny in a sense that’s the thing they go into is again, this sort of like fighting against mortality while grappling in a very real way with mortality. Even at age 12.
BN It’s sweet too, because Sadie is really the only person that Sam can open up to. And if it sounds like we’re dancing around a lot of stuff in this conversation, we are. If you want the spoilers of this conversation, you’re gonna have to join us for the B&N Book Club event, and the details for that are on BN.com. But in this conversation, we are staying spoiler-free. So, Sam’s ailment is going to stay a little mysterious, at least in this conversation. But you do have a moment—and this sort of really establishes who these kids are—Sam is very withdrawn, he’s not particularly trusting, except of Sadie, and Sadie. she’s made a decision that’s walking the line between friendship and charity with Sam. They have this sort of very complicated relationship from start, but they clearly really do adore each other.
GZ: They do. And I think Sadie has a flaw‑but I don’t think this is completely a flaw—I think it’s that she really craves approve approval, and she really craves achievement. And if anything this is perhaps her dominant character trait. And it’s, I think, reflected in her portrayal of Sam early in the story. And I think she never really loses that. And I’m not angry at her for having it in a way because she is a person who like myself is really driven and doesn’t want things that are easy. Sometimes that means sacrificing a friendship or relationship. And I don’t think that makes her a terrible person, it just means there is something she wants more. And maybe that kind of gets into where the idea of women and this cliched idea that women can have it all. I get the sentiment of it, however, I think life is basically choices. And sometimes you choose certain things, which means you don’t have other things.
B&N: But also if Sadie were a guy, we would be having a very different conversation, wouldn’t we?
GZ: Yes, we would completely be having a different conversation. And it’s funny, I think anyone that struggles to understand Sadie’s motivations, possibly doesn’t know what it is to be an incredibly ambitious woman. I think from my point of view, when I think about her, there are things that she craves that Sam and Marx even do not crave, this kind of like outward approval (that are also things that I myself crave) that she needs, the more—and the word I guess I’m looking for is validated—you know, she needs to be validated creatively as an individual. And so again, even that kind of first error she makes with Sam goes back to this need for validation to be better than the sister, to pay attention to me a little bit.
B&N: But Sadie is also a woman in an industry that’s dominated by men, and always has been, I mean, it’s starting to change now it feels like but for a long time, she was kind of the first and only in the room.
And there’s a moment to where she’s at MIT, and another woman in her class was just like, Yeah, we’re not friends, we’re competitors, we are not going to be a unified front in any way. And in fact, she complains about a game that Sadie creates. That’s actually really kind of interesting. So can you talk about Solution and how you knew that was the game that Sadie was going to have to create?
GZ: Well, it’s interesting, you mentioned the other woman in her class, because I do remember (and I was born in 1977), I do remember a time where it didn’t feel like women could really be allies of each other, that you were kind of just fighting so hard for this one place and that you were going to be the only woman that succeeded at the expense of all other women, you. I think the world is much less like that today. But I kind of wanted to write a theme that depicted that, when you think, hey, these two women are going to become collaborators, they’re going to become partners in some way, they’re going to help each other. And that just doesn’t happen. She’s very threatened by her and her relationship with, with Dov and this kind of thing. But with regard to Solution, I just liked thinking, What would be a really clever game that a student could come up with? So it got me thinking about—at that age—the kind of things I was really interested in. In a sense, it’s, to me, it’s a great use of games, because, you know, in Solution—is this a spoiler?
B&N: I don’t think this is, in particular, there’re some other games that you and I are gonna stay away from.
GZ: This is fairly early in the book, but…Sadie has a grandmother, who is a Holocaust survivor. And so this is kind of her inspiration for the game culturally. And she writes this thing, it looks kind of like Tetris, and you’re like, if you’re mindlessly building the widgets and you don’t actually read the information, it’s coming from the screen, you don’t realize that you’re working for the Third Reich. Because kind of the idea of the game, the person who gets the highest scoring solution actually loses the game morally. And so I thought this would be the kind of thing that somebody in college would come up with and think was very, very, very clever. And I liked these kinds of games myself, the idea that you know that you can use a game and the kind of mechanics of a game to teach someone something that they might not understand otherwise—because, by the way, I am guilty of this when I play a game. I do not Iike to get bored, I don’t always want to read all the text that’s coming up. So I’m very much somebody who would probably lose a game morally and be like, Oh, I would laugh at it a little bit. But Sadie’s classmate does not laugh at it, does not find it funny, she finds it offensive. She’s also Jewish and finds the thing very, very offensive. I think it’s interesting though, because part of what it sets up to is the idea that Sadie doesn’t really want to create games just as everyone else knows them. She’s not actually interested in creating the nest Next Big Thing: Ms. Pac Man, Donkey Kong.
B&N: But she really wants to be able to tell a story. And you’ve written for film. You’ve written novels for adults and for the YA market. And then you’ve also now written games, because you had to create the games that are in this book. So it all comes back to story. But who showed up first in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? Was it a character? Or was it an idea for one of the games that really spurred everything?
GZ: The first thing I had was pretty much the first scene of the novel. And it was this guy in a train station. And I could see, and I could imagine this train station in the night, just that he was around, disliking everyone, and was so curmudgeonly, and something about him told me he was like a math major, and that he was one of those guys who was like, 21 that has the air of somebody who was like, 45, you know, he had experience and lived a lot. And so I just had this, I think I had that character first, but I knew that he was in a story about games. At that point, I have a scene, but I don’t have a novel… And you know, I was asked a similar question, which was, who was who came first Sam or Sadie. And the fact is, I can’t imagine them existing without the other one. It’s all a novel of balance, in a way. And so from my point of view, Sam had a name slightly before Sadie had a name. So he was slightly born before Sadie, but there is no Sam without Sadie, not at all, and so I just knew that he was trying to avoid a person who ran into him in a train station, that he was just somebody who didn’t want to talk to whoever this person was. And then I realized he did. And so anyway, it was this whole, it was a whole process of learning to know this character better. And, in fact, I had been reading (just before I started) The Age of Innocence. And there’s a part right at the beginning of The Age of Innocence that talks about that the whole society had been sort of, like hieroglyphic, and that everything symbolizes something else. And I think there’s a lot of Sam in that and his observation that it’s lucky that the brain is programmed in such a way as to be able to, like, say one thing and feel and mean another. Another, and so I think that was essentially very Sam. The first kind of way I even knew Sam at all was that this description of him in the oversized coat—you know it takes a while to know a character. But once I started asking myself, where did that coat come from? Why is it oversized? So, I’m gonna call it comes from the Army/Navy surplus store, and Marx as bought it, that’s why it’s oversized. And what does that mean that your roommate has bought you a coat? And how and why doesn’t Sam know it was bought for him? And then once you start something as simple as a coat can kind of make all of these details I think, of character and story come together.
B&N: It’s a great opening for the book to Sam and Sadie come back together. And this is where we meet Marx, who is Sam’s roommate at the time. And do you think Sam and Sadie would have been able to create everything that they did without Marx, because he really—for a young college student—he really does sort of keep them focused and sort of gets them to think in ways that artists don’t always necessarily want to think about.
GZ: You know, the character of Marx is somebody who is incredibly intelligent, and somewhat directionless. When we first meet him, I think he thinks he’s a college actor, and he knows that that’s not going to be his future. In a way he’s like his father, who is a businessman. And I think he is somebody and he talks about it himself. Like, is it happenstance that I became producer of games, or is this something I would have chosen to do? Did I just make games because I was around some people that likes making games? But no, I think Marx is, I think Marx is a person who is just indispensable to them. There has to be someone at some point who pays the bills who waters the plants, who figures out how you’re going to sell a game to somebody else, no matter how great something is. And I know that firsthand as a novelist. I’m really grateful—you look at say, the galley of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Jenny Jackson has a letter—she’s my editor—in the front. And at some point, you need somebody to say, This is why you should read this book (that is not me, you know). Marx says, all of those things, I am really grateful as a novelist to not be the person who has to do every single job with regard to how a novel arrives…since I have been doing it for a while. My first novel was published 17 years ago; the only good thing that happened for that novel was that it was in Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers [program]. That was it. There was really, really nothing else that happened for that novel at all. Just put it out there. So, but you know, but once that happened, I became aware, so much of how many people are involved in the work of getting a novel to readers. And so in a way Marx is that person; he represents for me all the people that help me get my work to other people, as well. And I’m really grateful for those people. And Marx is creative. I know we want to go spoiler-free, but just to say that as he becomes more and more formidable to Sadie, I think she begins to see him differently, as well as she sees him as a creative person as a contributor, you know, because at first, she’s very much like, resistant to him, she thinks he’s just a shallow, rich kid, you know, that is not going to be helpful to them, like great, you have money, you can give us an apartment, but I just don’t want you involved in this at all. And I think the evolution of that relationship, and the evolution of Sadie’s character is really important the story.
B&N: Absolutely. And part of Marx’s role in the book too, though, is he introduces Sadie to her ultimate problem solver. She is working on the bones of the game that is really going to make their name, it’s Ichigo. And she knows it has to open with a storm, and she hasn’t quite figured out how to make this happen. And Marx is in a play, and this is where Shakespeare meets gaming in your book. So can we talk about Marx’s little assist?
GZ: Well, it’s funny, like Sam drags her to—he doesn’t drag her, she’s eager to meet him, but they go to see the play which is Twelfth Night, but the director who made it had really wanted to make The Tempest. And so she spent all her resources…which is justifiable, because there is also a shipwreck… and they’re sitting in the audience, and…she begins to have ideas about what the beginning of a game could look like. But unfortunately, once you say storm, that means weather, that means elements, that means lighting, that means all of these things that, frankly, are going to be on the beyond the resources of the game that Sam said that they could make in a summer, you know.
And, you know, so eventually, she comes to a place where they come up with so many great ideas for the game, but it just doesn’t look like the game she knows she wants it to look like. And at that point, they realize that they’re going to need to get a game engine. Now for our listeners that don’t know what a game engine is, it’s a set of tools that helps you to build parts of the game. It can do with the lighting, it can do with character builds, it can be all different kinds of tools that sort of help somebody to make a game without having to build the whole thing out of whole cloth. And in this case, what they need are sort of like visual tools. And so that’s what sort of happens in the story. Unfortunately, the person who controls the game engine has all the power. And the game engine that they get is from Sadie’s professor Dov, who was also her some time boyfriend, and it really just changes the power dynamic. And I liked the idea of the engine is kind of like a god machine. And so you can imagine that that gives an enormous power to somebody that is not the person who wants the game engine, and it’s sort of big, and ties this person to Sadie and Sam and Marx’s professional life forever.
B&N: And I love the way you describe it in the book, you call it a physics and graphics engine, which means you’re rendering the story in 3D. It’s all of the things that make the story come alive.
GZ: And it is, you know, it’s the narrative thrust of a game, right? I never thought I would be writing something that you know, where there would be a lot of like, intricate feelings around the game engine. You know, I didn’t think like but then if you think about something like say, like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, you know, like, who would think that you could feel so much passion over whether like, they go to that dance together, you know? And so to me, I like love the idea that you can build all of this drama, around something that seems like I never even knew what that thing was before, you know, you have, you know, you sit down and read this book. And so I liked that I liked the fact that in a way, it was one of the things that really attracted me to writing about games in the first place, that there were like stories and scenes that I had not seen before, that were driven by this kind of like technology that gave me new places I could go into writing.
B&N: Sam has a great line, where he’s talking about sort of the influences that they had. And he’s like, Well, it’s Dickens. And it’s the Bible. And it’s Chuck Close, the artist. And it’s Philip Glass, the composer. And he’s like it’s a lot of different things. But I can see all of it actually, after reading your novel. It makes perfect sense that these are all of the elements that you have to pull in. Because you need the music, you need the movement, that actual physical movement of the characters through the game, all of these things. And you know, you’d still need a story. It’s no fun to play a game, if there’s no story and nothing happens, you can’t just sit under a tree, on your computer, for the entire thing. That’s no fun. So that brings me to Ichigo, which is the game that Sam and Sadie create sort of together. He’s got the conceptual art happening, she’s building the actual thing. And then they have to make a decision about who to publish the game with. And this is where we start to see a little bit of a break, because Sadie really wants to stick with the creative purity of it all. And Sam was like, I would like to get paid, please, I would really like to get paid. And I respect that, because he doesn’t come from the resources that Sadie does.
GZ: Yeah. And I think, you know, it’s a weakness in a novel when it doesn’t address money. And I felt like this was so much of a thing between these two characters. Sam is not poor, per se, but his grandparents are really working class. They own a pizza parlor in Koreatown, based on a real pizza parlor in Koreatown. And they are working class. He’s at Harvard, he has a full ride to Harvard, but that doesn’t like cover expenses, or anything like that. He is somebody who has health problems, and he needs insurance. …Sadie is upper middle class, or actually, she’s rich, Sadie is rich. And so she’s able to have a lot more freedom about the decisions she can make in their career. It comes down to when no one company is offering them creative freedom. And maybe they’ll make just as much money in the long run. And that’s where Sadie wants to go. She wants creative freedom. But he has health problems and money problems and doesn’t come from rich people and needs to choose for money. And so she makes that decision for him. And I think in a way when you have a kind of collaboration like that, there’s a frustration because some of your decisions start to feel out of your control. Because there’s no way if Sadie’s alone she’s choosing that. There’s no way that that’s the path she takes, even if it’s the right path. And I think most of the people in their circle think it’s the right path.
B&N: But they end up building this kind of extraordinary company called Unfair Games, which is really great name. But we watched this organization grow and change. And we watched Sadie and Sam and Marx in the context of all of this change, I mean, they all have real trajectories. In this story, no one is static. In some cases, there’re some do-overs. In some cases, you watch them—as some people might say—leading with their chins. Decisions get made that don’t always work. But are you sitting down and mapping this out? Or are you letting them sort of show you where you need to go in the story? Who are you, as the creative driving this narrative?
GZ: It’s a combination of both things. I always, when I think about a book, I do think about kind of how the plot’s going to move through the whole thing. And I need to come up with an ending. It is rarely this ending. I just need to know that this book could end somewhere, theoretically, but it doesn’t have to be the one I’ve imagined. And it almost never is. I don’t know the ending for sure until I got there. But there’s some part of my brain that needs to believe if I take this plane off, it’s going to land in some city. Right? And so that’s kind of a thing for me whenever I’m writing. And I think as I’ve gotten more experienced as a novelist, I’ve just felt more willing to let the characters be unruly and out of control, that once I’ve kind of set them going, I have an idea of things that I want to explore and do, but I like to be surprised…and I know they are constructions that I have made, the closer they get to being people the more I am surprised. I like books to have the messiness of life and I think there was some part of me that when I started out as a novelist felt uncomfortable with that, that you wanted them to behave in a more easy way for the arc. And so there are multiple times in this book where some element will happen, or something will happen and it won’t have been exactly the thing that in my mind was going to happen, even something like we spoke about earlier.
I’m trying not to spoil still, like the thing with Sadie’s volunteers on ended up being a surprise to me. I didn’t really know that that’s what was happening. I knew that there was a betrayal between these two people, but I didn’t know exactly what it was, you know. I thought maybe it was just, I think in my original conception, it might have been something like, as they get older and approach high school, they grow apart for a time and they come together. I didn’t realize that there was going to be an actual incident with real damages from their point of view about this, and that that incident would be tied to an actual object as well. So I didn’t know that when I started writing the book, and that those kinds of things actually improve a novel for me. They improve a novel when I’m reading it, they improve the novel when I’m writing.
B&N: Do you have a favorite moment with these guys?
GZ: So the part on Matsumoto Peach farm is my favorite part of the book, probably because it’s a real place. And I had a friend who went, and you have to write an essay to go pick the peaches there. And so anyway, they brought back peaches for me, and I’ve always wanted to go, but I’ve never written the essay or had time to go. And you know, I just liked that moment, because it hasn’t really nothing to do with games. It’s just this purely organic, idyllic world that we are in, so that was a moment that I think of in the book, and I won’t really again, it would spoil it to say wherever.
B&N: So, I want to get back to your literary influences for a second. Because I mean, obviously, we’ve talked about sort of what the characters have alluded to, but anyone who has read your earlier book, The Storied Life of AJ Fickry, knows that you have a love of short stories that you were very widely read. And you have a lot of opinions about books, and some of them you gave to Fikry. But I think it also you’ve mentioned in earlier interviews, that Little House in the Big Woods was the first chapter book your dad ever bought for you, and that you were also a fan of Charlotte’s Web, but maybe sometimes it’s your favorite book. And maybe sometimes it’s not. So can we talk about the stages of Gabrielle as a reader? Like, who were you as a tiny person? And how did we get here?
GZ: We certainly can. It’s very funny, because as I mentioned, my first novel was published in 2005. So that’s now 17 years ago. So you give a lot of interviews over time that, you know, they seem like they’re given by a different person entirely. You know, that like, I’m like, Yeah, that’s a Little House in the Big Woods. That’s interesting that I said that at some point, which is actually true. I do remember my dad getting this book for me. I don’t remember loving it. You know, as I think about it, I remember what I remember loving about it was the fact that my dad thought I was like mature enough to deal with like a real book. I’m not like somebody who’s insanely into like Laura Ingalls Wilder or something like that. When I think about this particular book, one of the things I will say is that I’m as much Daniel Parrish, who is the novelist character in The Storied Life of AJ Fickry, as I am AJ Fickry, a lot of his opinions. I recently had to go through the book again, so I kind of remember it, he talks about how it’s so easy to write a bestseller when you’re 25. And you know nothing, that kind of thing. And like I say, there’s a lot of other opinions he has about writing and just the author’s life in general. I’ve had a lot of the experience is over the years of people coming up to me and saying this one book of yours is my favorite by far, which is something that happens to him, like over and over again in, in his career. And now by the way, I’m fine with that. It’s usually a different book, it’s not always the same ones. And I’m fine with that. Because you’re just glad to have had anything resonate with anyone. But for thinking about this book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it’s the book that feels closest to me of anything I have written because… it reflects places I’ve lived in, places I’ve worked. The primary settings are Los Angeles and Cambridge. And also Japan. I have worked in Japan as well, it just reflects the fact that you know, Sam’s ethnic identity is exactly mine, which I’ve never written before, which is I’m half-Korean, and half-Eastern European Jewish on my dad’s side. So in a way, because this book is so close to me, it feels easy to speak about in a certain way….For many years, I think I think fiction was kind of a mask I wore and that for me, an interest was like burying myself in the book, as opposed to exposing myself in the book. I remember what I wrote Elsewhere, I described her as physically different from me as possible, the main character… because I didn’t want there to be any chance anyone mistook her for me. You know, even though, in fact, so much of Elsewhere, really, to me, reflects the point of view of an outsider or a biracial Asian person in America. Even its point of view is that, but it’s optics are not that, and so I think it’s maybe it’s strange, it was hard for readers to find where I was in those books. And you know, so yeah, like in AJ Fickry, it wasn’t really something that people talked about, but to me, it is a book by biracial author about biracial people. So when I thought about that, and I think so much of my experiences, as a writer and as a person have been colored by the fact that I feel like sometimes as an outsider, and the one place that can connect with people is through through books, and so I think, in some ways, that’s where that that book came from. And so there is a through line, I think, from these books, to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
B&N: Sam has a great line to where he says, Well, you can’t spoil a game, but you can spoil a book.
GZ: And I just, I love that idea. Because, you know, the game’s narrative is always changing. That’s the whole point. Like you play it differently. Each time you learn things, you do things differently. Liz has a similar experience in Elsewhere.
B&N: And obviously, we’re gonna let folks go discover that one for themselves as well. But it’s this constant learning and figuring out and going forward and having multiple lives in a way, which is what all of your characters do in the new book as well.
GZ: And I think that particular line is something that I read in Tom Bissell. And I can’t remember if I read it before I thought it or I read Tom Bissell after, but in any case, in one of Tom Bissell books, he says something quite similar. And I think that the funny thing, when you get kind of like, deeper into thinking about games is that they too have a story. But in a way, they give you the illusion of agency sometimes. But the game itself also has a story built in, you know, but there isn’t maybe an obstacle in a novel. And that’s kind of a good thing. I think when you’re reading a novel,
B&N: Do you miss this world? Do you miss hanging out with these guys? You spent five years with them.
GZ: I do miss this world. I will say it’s harder to imagine the thing that’s next for me because I felt so immersed with these people, I guess, is the only way to put it. I don’t know if other authors experienced this, but for me, there’s a time when you get kind of maybe a year past a book where it starts to feel like somebody else wrote it entirely, like, maybe that’s me because I’m eager to cast myself away. In a way I think Sadie has this quality too, when I’m not entirely Sadie, but I’m partially Sadie. I’m partially everyone, but I’m partially fading and she always kind of wants to, like, shed the skin of the things she’s done before, you know, and I don’t feel as eager to shed the skin. Like I had this feeling when I saw the book jacket that it was the first time I’d ever looked at a book jacket of mine. And I’ve liked some of my other book jackets, by the way, so I’m not saying I haven’t but where I felt like, Oh, this looks like me. I recognize myself in this, and so there’s a way in which it makes it easier to speak about the book and more difficult at the same time.
B&N: Do you think you’d ever write a sequel to this? Is there more for these guys?
GZ: I can’t imagine, but you just never know. I feel like I’ve left them where I wanted them to be. It’s interesting because even reading like you know, Jonathan Franzen’s book last winter, and knowing that that we’re not at the end of whatever that story is, whatever Crossroads is, we’re not at the end of Crossroads yet, and having to kind of factor that in. But I feel like when you get to the end of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, we feel like we’re at the end. You know, I think the questions that you’re left with are ones that she kind of exist in your mind, you know, then if I fill them in for you. It sort of makes that book more, less elegant or something, you know, but never say, Never say never, you know?
B&N: Well, I partially asked because you did write a trilogy, the birthright series. And you didn’t know that was going to be a trilogy when you started, I think, right. Am I remembering that correctly?
GZ: I did think it was.
B&N: Okay.
GZ: So a funny story about that was a particular thing. I had written a novel that I didn’t, I wasn’t entirely sure was YA. And although I thought maybe it was middle grade, but the way I thought when I read it was that it was going to be like A Little Prince, that it was kind of going to be sort of this fantasy, like small fairy tale or fantasy that adults would like, as well. So the problem was that the book did really well. And were like, my publisher said what more do you have? So in a sense, writing that series was a solution to a problem, which was that I had, not anything more really about 16-year-olds, and so, I wanted to the reason I wanted to write a series is because I couldn’t make that person grow up. She was like, 16 in book one, and by the end, she’s like, 24, or something. There are a lot of people that can kind of write many, many books about that particular time of life, but I’m not one of them. And in the end, I think the series didn’t do very well, but I don’t regret it, because I learned so much, learning character, even living with that character over time, you know? So it was a really expensive failure for my publisher, but a great learning experience for me.
B&N: So are you going to keep moving back and forth between books for adults and books for YA?
GZ: Well, in fact, I have not written a book for young adults for a decade.
B&N: Okay.
GZ: So that seems to think so yeah, pretty much the end of that series with the end of me doing that, and I think it’s the last and the last three novels I’ve published are open for adults, so probably not, unless I had a story that said to me, oh, boy, just really want to be for children, something really special for children, that I would maybe consider doing it, but it’s not a canvas I want to paint on anymore.
B&N: So we’re not the only fans, obviously, of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Tayari Jones is a huge fan, John Green is a huge fan of it, there’s a whole list of folks who love this book the way we do. And we’ll put the names of the books that you mentioned as inspiration as well into the show notes just so folks can take a look at them. Because the next there’s some great writing about gaming in The Nix But there’s also a really great moment where mom is leaving her husband and son. And the way she does it is so elegant and unexpected. And she’s just sort of removing one thing at a time until they sort of noticed that things are missing. And maybe mom is missing too. But it’s a really terrific.
GZ: Interestingly, that scene is also in A Widow for One Year. She’s shows a slow-motion pack up there, which and I know John Irving blurbed The Nix as well. And but I do feel like again, those scenes are definitely like holding hands with each other, you know?
B&N: But Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, too, is in development for film. So we’ll see it at some point.
GZ: Yes, yes, I finished. I’m writing the screenplay, which, at certain points in the process, I would think to myself, Why do I want to turn this rather long book into 120 pages? Why exactly do I want to do that? But in fact, it was an interesting process to kind of just streamline and simplify everything into a screenplay. So I turned in a draft of that. And, you know, we’re negotiating how to get as much of that book and I feel like I have producers who are really protective of the book and really want as much of that book in this movie as can be as possible. And so I think that when I look at movies, I don’t see a lot of movies that are like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, these kinds of sweeping movies that are two and a half hours and you feel like wrung out when it’s done. I feel like that’s more a movie of a different era, like the 1970s or something. So I’m curious to see how it works out. I’m not just curious. I mean, I’m an active participant in how this works out.
B&N: Well, I can’t wait to see it. And I can’t wait for other folks to read tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And just a reminder, the book club meet up is I think at the end of July this time around, so just check bn.com The details will be there and we will be fully going into the spoilers there. But this is airing right as the book is coming out. And this has been one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in a while. I love these characters. I love what you put them through. Even the one thing that we were talking about before we started taping.
GZ: Right, which we didn’t talk about now. We’ll talk about that at book club.
B&N: We’ll talk about that book club. Gabrielle Zevin, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Your new book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is out now.
GZ: thank you so much