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<\/p>\nA dozen people told me to read Tomorow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow but for a long time I couldn\u2019t see why. The book, written by Gabrielle Zevin, is a phenomenon. In 2021, before it was even published, its screen rights were bought for $2 million by Paramount Pictures in a 25-way auction. Since it came out in July 2022 it has spent 48 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, been reprinted 21 times in the US and acquired more than half a million ratings on Goodreads. In the UK, it\u2019s the fifth bestselling paperback of the year \u2013 beating David Walliams, Colleen Hoover and Stephen King.<\/p>\n
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But it\u2019s about video gaming. Specifically, about two gamers called Sadie and Sam who bond as children in hospital over Super Mario Bros and, a decade later, start a gaming business. I\u2019m 57, and my gaming experience is limited to Tetris and Candy Crush on my phone, as well as Sonic the Hedgehog, played with my stepson when he was small. It took me a while to see past the book\u2019s geeky premise.<\/p>\n
But I was wrong. Tomorrow isn\u2019t just about computer games. It\u2019s about love and friendship, betrayal and misunderstanding, success and failure. It\u2019s about life and the way we let ourselves and each other down, as well as how we learn to forgive. Everyone who told me to read it said the same thing that I will say to you now: \u2018It\u2019s about video games, but you\u2019ll love it.\u2019 And you will.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No one is more surprised by this unlikely sales technique than the author. \u2018It\u2019s funny,\u2019 Zevin tells me, on Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. \u2018Whether it\u2019s a professional critic or just regular people writing on Instagram, they almost always begin with a statement about their relationship to video games, like: \u201cI have never played a video game before in my life. But I liked this book.\u201d It\u2019s not as if, when you read a book about the Second World War, you immediately feel the need to state your relationship to it, like, \u201cI never fought in the Second World War\u201d or \u201cNone of my grandparents fought.\u201d But that\u2019s the way people have talked about this book.\u2019<\/p>\n
Zevin, 46, has been published since she was 27, with ten novels to her name. Her career has had highs and lows. In 2005, her first two books were released within three months of each other and fared very differently. Elsewhere, a young adult novel about the afterlife, sold more than 300,000 copies and was a hit; Margarettown, an adult novel about a man who falls in love with a woman called Margaret Towne, erm, wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u2018When I wrote my first books and one did well, one did badly, it was quite humiliating to have failed so publicly,\u2019 Zevin admits. \u2018But over the years I have gotten quite good at failing, and failure can be very creative. If you let it.\u2019<\/p>\n
Things were comparatively uneventful until 2014 when she published her eighth novel, The Storied Life of A J Fikry, about a bad-tempered bookseller who\u2019s been bereaved. It has sold more than five million copies worldwide.<\/p>\n
However, in 2017, Zevin found herself in a slump. She was on tour with her ninth novel, Young Jane Young. \u2018It was memorable for being one of the worst book tours I ever did,\u2019 she says. \u2018It was hurricane season in the US and the hurricane followed me from destination to destination. I\u2019d get to Miami, and there\u2019d be no food on the shelves because the delivery trucks couldn\u2019t get in. Or there was a power failure in Atlanta. I got home from that book tour, and I remember feeling like\u2026\u2019 she sighs.<\/p>\n
\u2018I found myself thinking about the video games I had played as a kid and trying to seek them out. But I couldn\u2019t, because video games are tied to particular kinds of hardware, so they can disappear forever.\u2019<\/p>\n
It gave her an idea. \u2018I just made a quick note: \u201cStory of two video game designers, the games they make are their lives.\u201d\u2019 I didn\u2019t really know anything else. I started researching it at the end of 2017, and really committed to it at the beginning of 2018. It was a slow process.\u2019 She finished most of the writing by 2020.<\/p>\n
As a lonely only child in early 1980s Florida, Zevin played games on her dad\u2019s computer. (Both her parents worked for IBM, her dad as a programmer, her mum in marketing.) \u2018I really responded to them because basically it was somebody to play with. I didn\u2019t have to enlist anybody else to play the games with me. I could do that alone.\u2019<\/p>\n
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Zevin describes her childhood as happy, \u2018filled with books and Saturday morning trips to the library\u2019. Her dad is of Jewish descent, her mum moved to America from Korea at the age of nine. Much like Sam in Tomorrow. Despite her parents working in tech, Zevin wasn\u2019t interested in programming. \u2018I always wanted to be a writer. My grandmother had an IBM Selectric typewriter,\u2019 she says. \u2018It was wonderfully clacky. You really felt like you were doing something when you were typing on it. So they propped me up on a stool. And I was just typing, not really words. I just liked the sound of the keys. So I think there was a tactile way [in which] I was drawn to writing.\u2019<\/p>\n
She got her first \u2018real job\u2019 at 14 as the teenage critic on her local paper, after writing an angry letter in response to a bad review of a Guns N\u2019 Roses concert. Then she went to Harvard to study English. There she met her partner, filmmaker Hans Canosa. After a decade or so in New York, they now live in LA with their rescue dogs, Frank and Leia.<\/p>\n
What did Canosa think when she told him she\u2019d written a book about two computer gamers? \u2018After he read it, he said: \u201cYou wrote this for me.\u201d I said: \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t. I wrote it for me.\u201d Next I gave it to my agent, and he was like: \u201cI think you wrote this for me.\u201d And I said: \u201cThat\u2019s really weird. Hans just said the same thing.\u201d Since then that\u2019s happened thousands of times. At events people still ask me to sign the book \u201cfor you\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n
How does it feel to have written one of those books \u2013 one people love so much, regardless of age, background and race? Zevin lets her character, Sam, answer:<\/p>\n
\u2018In the book, Sam says he never realised a funny, mixed-race kid like him could be the centre of the world, and not just at its periphery. That\u2019s how I feel too, because of the way people have chosen to see themselves in this. Most readers have nothing in common with the characters: they don\u2019t do their jobs, they\u2019re resistant to the concept. And yet, somehow, they still see themselves in it. I feel really honoured.\u2019<\/p>\n
Has Tomorrow\u2019s success cast a shadow over what comes next? Zevin shakes her head. \u2018This book has had an enormous and special reaction, one I\u2019m so grateful for, but I don\u2019t expect the next to be the same. I feel excited to get back to work in a way I\u2019ve never felt before. For a long time, I felt an anxiety that I was always failing slightly. Relieved of that, I\u2019m excited to go again.\u2019<\/p>\n