“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is a New York Times best-selling book about love, art and video games.
The author, Gabrielle Zevin, will be in Minneapolis on Friday to promote the paperback launch of her book two years after release. MPR News reporter Kyra Miles spoke with Zevin ahead of the event.
Zevin: I’m already laughing at that because I’ve been promoting the book for two years. And it’s kind of embarrassing to say that I still find “Tomorrow” somewhat hard to synopsis. So I’ll add to that “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is the story of Sam Mazur and Sadie Green, who have a three-decade-long friendship and artistic collaboration. And for me, the crux of the story is maybe how difficult it is to connect even though we have ever-increasing means to do so — but the real possibility of making meaningful connections in virtual spaces.
You know, I don’t know if I’m trying to create people that are imperfect, but I am trying to create people and people are imperfect. I think there are some people that want to read characters that are maybe better than us in some way, but I am not that reader. I think the thing that moves me most in fiction is the sort of gap between the way we perceive ourselves and the way we perceive others.
It’s been two years in hardcover. And it’s been great to just see it kind of sell and sell and sell. But with a lower price point, I’m excited that it gets to even more readers, readers who maybe felt resistant to the idea [of] a literary novel about video games, will think, “Hey, now that the price is lower, maybe I’ll try a novel about video games.”
I mean, I think all stories are love stories or lack-of-love stories. I think, in a sense, you can find it in even the most like ostensibly just esoteric literary fiction. At core, we’re talking about: Were you loved enough? Did you love enough? And so I see all stories as love stories, even as somebody who writes literary fiction. But that said, I think the word romance has a burden that it doesn’t need to have, you know. I think the book is not a romance, not in the way people think of romance. But I do think it is about two people who have a romance of the mind, but not a romance of the body.
I think the worlds that my characters find themselves in in the book is the world. It has all of the things in it, not necessarily the particularity of 2024, you know, but it doesn’t exist in a world that doesn’t have conflict. When the book came out in 2022, there’s a little bit that has to do with gun violence in the book, or maybe not a little bit, maybe a significant part of the book. And at the time I was doing interviews, journalists would ask me, “How did you know there would be another gun crime in the U.S. when you wrote this book?” I’m like, “because there’s always another gun crime in the U.S.” And so if you write books that are, again, more in the world, I think they they feel more maybe naturally continuous with the way we live right now.
When we went out with the book, it sold in manuscript — actually, it had its first film offers before we even sold the book — they actually kind of happened at the same time. But I said to my agents that I really thought it should be a limited series. And so of course, the best offers that came back were for movies. I don’t feel desperately sad. There are some authors who are very eager to see their characters come to life on screen. But I never felt that way. Even though obviously it would be meaningful, probably financially, it would bring your books to a broader audience, and there are advantages to that happening, but I also just love the way a book can just exist as a book.
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