5 Thoughts on Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

A discourse on creativity and the best book I almost didn't read.

Aug 05, 2024

Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin might go down as one of the best books I’ve read certainly this year, but well beyond that too— maybe the decade. And to think that I almost didn’t read it.

It was released in the summer of 2022. I remember seeing it everywhere at the time, and the back cover copy did catch my eye:

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. They borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo: a game where players can escape the confines of a body and the betrayals of a heart, and where death means nothing more than a chance to restart and play again. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.

But— I’m not a gamer. In fact I’m as far away from being a gamer as I might be from let’s say… researching the Arctic Tundra, for example.1 And so, I shamefully admit, I didn’t really bother. Until a few weeks ago as I was walking through my local library and saw the book staring at me from the display shelf.

On a whim, I picked it up.

It turns out, I had nothing to worry about.

In one of her interviews, Gabrielle Zevin made an interesting observation. She said that most reviews and critiques she reads on her book start with the reviewer’s relationship to video games— namely whether they’ve never played one or whether they’re die hard fans. But, she says, you don’t have to necessarily deeply engage with a subject to enjoy a story on it. Of course not; why did I ever think differently? She gives the example of: if one is reading, let’s say, All The Light We Cannot See, they don’t then go: ‘I was never a soldier, I was never in World War Two…’

Needless to say, I can’t believe I would have missed out on this book because of my silly preconceived notions of gaming.

So— please heed my warning: if for some reason, like me, you aren’t into video games, don’t let that stop you from reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Also— doesn’t it have the most beautiful title?

1. There are two ‘meet cutes’. And I love them both.

The one that comes first in the book (on pg. 6), is the one that comes second in Sam and Sadie’s lives, after they haven’t spoken to each other for almost a decade.

"Sadie Green!" he called out again. Still she didn't hear him. He quickened his pace, as much as he could. When he walked quickly, he counterintuitively felt like a person in a three-legged race.
"Sadie! SADIE!" He felt foolish. "SADIE MIRANDA GREEN! YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!"
Finally, she turned. She scanned the crowd slowly and when she spotted Sam, the smile spread over her face like a time-lapse video he had once seen in a high school physics class of a rose in bloom. It was beautiful, Sam thought, and perhaps, he worried, a tad ersatz. She walked over to him, still smiling—one dimple on her right cheek, an almost imperceptibly wider gap between the two middle teeth on the top—and he thought that the crowd seemed to part for her, in a way that the world never moved for him.
"It's my sister who died of dysentery, Sam Masur," Sadie said. “I died of exhaustion, following a snakebite."

The real first meet cute happens when we’re taken back in time to an 11 and 12 -year-old Sadie and Sam in a hospital game room.

But the game room was not empty. A boy was playing Super Mario Bros. Sadie determined he was a sick kid, and not a sibling or a visitor like herself: he was wearing pajamas in the middle of the day, a pair of crutches rested on the floor beside his chair, and his left foot was surrounded by a medieval-looking cage-like contraption. She estimated the boy was her age, eleven, or a little older. He had tangled curly black hair, a puggish nose, glasses, a cartoonishly round head. In Sadie's art class at school, she had been taught to draw by breaking things down into basic shapes. To depict this boy, she would have needed mainly circles.
She sat on the floor next to him and watched him play. He was skilled—at the end of the level, he could make Mario land at the top of the flagpole, something Sadie had never mastered. Although Sadie liked to be the player, there was a pleasure to watching someone who was a dexterous player—it was like watching a dance. He never looked over at her. Indeed, he didn't seem to notice she was there. He cleared the first boss battle, and the words BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE appeared on the screen.
Without looking over at her, he said, "You want to play the rest of this life?"

What a great line of dialogue, but it’s also brilliant foreshadowing. Because the whole book is a contrast and compare dialogue between the video game with its infinite possibilities and lives, and the real world where choices have consequences on a finite number of possibilities.

2. There are two significant deaths.

I’m not going to give away any spoilers, but both are heavy. For me, without doubt, this was an emotionally heavy book. And not only because of the deaths. Gabrielle Zevin knows how to drive her reader crazy in the best possible way. On one of my notes from pg. 225, I have:

Emotional fatigue from foreshadowing. Why are Sam and Sadie not getting together for heaven's sake?!?!

which brings me to my next thought:

3. Friendship is complicated.

I’m a romantic at heart, a sucker for a good love story, and I always root for a ‘get together’. So, it goes without saying that from the moment Sam and Sadie first meet after years of not talking, I wanted them together, living happily ever after. But this wasn’t one of those books. Over and over again, it tested my preconceived idea of love. I felt myself rooting for what I wanted to happen, while at the same time knowing that good books rarely go the way you want them to. Anything could happen. And I’m not giving away any spoilers here either— All I’m saying is: if you want to read one of the best stories about the intersection of love and friendship, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is your book.

4. As much as this is a book about video games and about friendship, my favourite part is its discourse on creativity–

Through its story, we see the process of art in such a raw, real life way.

Creativity can be a struggle. With soaring highs and devouring lows. Gabrielle Zevin shows it all.

There’s a part on pg. 73 where Sam and Sadie are watching Sam’s good friend, Marx in a performance of Twelfth Night, and an idea for their game suddenly hits Sadie.

Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, though textually this happens offstage. But the director, who was a professional and not a student, had decided to elaborately stage the shipwreck, using much of the ample budget the college had given her to entice her to work with students in the first place. Undulating layers of programmed laser light and smoke; the sounds of waves crashing, thunder, and rain; and even a gentle misting of cold water that made the audience gasp and applaud like delighted children. The cast had sniped that the only thing Jules cared about was the shipwreck, and that it was clear she wished she was directing The Tempest instead of Twelfth Night.
Sadie, who knew nothing of this scuttlebutt, found the shipwreck mesmerizing. She whispered in Sam's ear, "Our game should start with a shipwreck. Or maybe, a storm." Even as she was saying it, she knew that "shipwreck," and all the elements that a shipwreck could entail, meant that the game might not be finished by September.
"Yes," Sam whispered back. "A child is lost at sea."
Sadie nodded and whispered back, "A little girl-she's maybe two or three years old—is lost at sea and she has to get back to her family, even though she doesn't even know her last name or her phone number or many words or numbers past ten."
"Why is it a little girl?" Sam asked. "Why isn't it a little boy?"
“I don’t know. Because in Twelfth Night it’s a girl?" Sadie said.
Someone sitting nearby shushed them.
“Let’s design the characters so they don’t have a gender,” Sam said.

This is exactly what ideas do. They strike at the most random moments.

There’s another example from pg. 50. What artist doesn’t know this feeling?

Sam set the invitation on the back of his desk and considered the envelope separately. The paper proved an irresistible temptation. He loosened its seams with steam from the tap and turned the envelope into a flat sheet of paper. He took out his favorite Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencil and began to draw a maze on the rescued paper.
Sam did not always know what he was drawing when he began a maze, but this time, he found himself drawing a series of circles and curves, and these circles somehow became Los Angeles. The maze started on the Eastside, in Echo Park, where Sam lived, and ended on the West-side, in the Beverly Hills flats, where Sadie lived. It wound through West Hollywood, up the Hollywood hills to Studio City, back down the hills to East Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Silver Lake, before finally circling around to Koreatown and Mid-City. He grew so absorbed in drawing the maze that he didn't even notice when Dong Hyun came into the room. It was late, and Dong Hyun smelled of pizza, as he usually did.

Gabrielle Zevin gives us failure:

"I want your advice about something," Sadie said.
"Of course."
"How do you get over a failure?"
"I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I'm not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it's true."
"So, what do I do?" she asked.
"You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it's a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better."

And then there’s this quote from pg. 392:

"You're probably right." Sam turned to face Sadie. "You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then—this, this, this, this. It's so easy to make a hit when you're young and you don't know anything."
"I think that, too," Sadie said. "The knowledge and experience we have—it isn't necessarily that helpful, in a way."

What the novel lays bare for me is this:

The creative muse gives us an idea. Our challenge then is to bring that idea into the word. This is where all our juicy growth happens. It’s a messy journey. It’s frustrating, it drives us to our limits, and the final piece never looks how it did when the muse first showed it to us. But— that’s her assurance we remain humble, her reminder that as artists, we’ll always be at her mercy.

5. The book is becoming a film.

No surprise here, but Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is becoming a film, and I’m happy to tell you that Siân Heder, the director of Coda has signed on to direct it. I have no doubt the film will stay true to the story, because Gabrielle Zevin was involved in writing its screenplay. When I found out, my first thoughts flew to who would play who in the film. For those of you who have read the book, opinions please…

TOAP

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