One of the book world’s hottest properties, Gabrielle Zevin is a game changer in more ways than one. Joanna Wane talks to the author in Los Angeles before her first visit to Auckland.
They don’t end up together. That’s not a spoiler, so don’t go hating on me if you haven’t yet read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a book so hot Paramount Pictures bought the rights for US$2 million in a bidding war before it was even published.
It’s not a “will they or won’t they” story, author Gabrielle Zevin has been telling people at writers’ events all over the world on her year-long promotional tour, which whistle-stops through Australia and New Zealand this month.
The last thing she wanted to write was yet another book that ends with two characters walking down the aisle and buying a house together, she says, but it’s still a love story. Sam and Sadie, who meet as kids in a hospital gaming room in 1987 and grow up to become superstar video game designers, are the most important people in each other’s lives. As Sadie sees it, lovers in this life are common. True collaborators are rare.
“Sadie is somebody who wants to be good at a thing more than she wants to be nice. And she wants to be good at a thing more than she wants to be loved,” Zevin tells Canvas via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, where she’s trying to ingratiate herself back into the affections of her two dogs, who don’t appreciate such long absences.
“I don’t want to say that Sam and Sadie don’t have a romance, because they do. It’s just a romance of the mind, not a romance of the body. What’s sad for me are the people who think there is only one kind of love that is valid in this world. All of us only have one life, we’re not like video game characters in that way. Wherever you find passion or fulfilment, you should be grateful for those things. And no one gets to tell you that’s not love.”
Don’t be misled by how young and fresh-faced she looks in her photos; Zevin is no naive ingenue. She’s 45 and has been in a relationship with her partner, film director Hans Canosa, for more than half her life. This latest novel, a New York Times bestseller and Amazon.com’s 2022 Book of the Year, is her 10th.
Described as a love letter to the literary gamer, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes its title from the nihilistic soliloquy in Macbeth on doomed destiny and the futility of life. In the gaming world, though, the possibilities for redemption are infinite. At a meaty 400 pages, it’s ambitious in scope, tackling everything from racism, anti-Semitism and cultural appropriation — like Sam, Zevin is half-Jewish and half-Korean — to homophobia, sexism, abusive relationships and the horrific mass shootings that plague the US.
While the darker moments are grim, Zevin is a master of sharp, funny dialogue. The emotional moments are never maudlin or sentimental and, like all intense friendships, Sam and Sadie’s relationship has its own cycles of closeness and estrangement. Sam is traumatised by a car crash that killed his mother when he was 12 and left him with a physical disability he’s able to shed in the virtual worlds where he games. The first (but not the last) time the book made me cry is a scene where he and Sadie are in a hospital room with the story’s other core character, Marx. The nurse on duty, who’s trying to figure out who’s coupled up, is struck by the comfortable intimacy between them all. “There is love here, she thought.”
Video games don’t rate a mention in any of Zevin’s first nine books, but her father was a computer programmer and both her parents worked at IBM for their entire careers. She’s been a gamer her whole life as part of what’s been dubbed the Oregon Trail Generation, the first cohort of children to grow up playing video games. Pac-Man first hit the arcades in 1980.
Like the games themselves, social mores have shifted through the decades. Tomorrow spans 30 years, ending in 2011, and Zevin stays authentic to the times. In today’s #MeToo climate, you’d like to think Sadie’s problematic relationship with her narcissistic tutor, Dov, would be held to account, but he’s not drawn as a one-dimensional villain. Influenced by his distaste for shooter games, Sadie, a literary nerd, subverts the genre with her first design project called EmilyBlaster, where players “shoot” words to re-assemble Emily Dickinson poems.
Once ubiquitous in US school computer labs, The Oregon Trail was an educational game created to teach children about the life of a 19th-century pioneer. Death from dysentery, a typical manner of demise in those days, is a running joke in Zevin’s novel. A new version of the game was recently released on Apple’s app store with an updated representation of Native Americans, including playable characters.
“The cool thing about its current iteration is that it points out that the idea of ‘manifest destiny’ [of US settlers] going from the East to the West was not good for all people,” says Zevin. “If you look at the history of The Oregon Trail and the way they’ve updated the game, you can learn a lot about how we thought about things at different points in time and how differently we think about them now.”
There hasn’t been much time for gaming, although recently she did another run-through of The Last of Us, the post-apocalyptic survival game that’s spawned a hit drama series. Zevin isn’t really a shooter fan, either — “even though some of the best games do involve excessive amounts of shooting and killing”. She and Canosa like playing Mario Golf together, which makes them sound desperately unhip.
The couple met at Harvard, where Zevin studied English. Canosa was doing a TV show and cast her in it. In 2005, Zevin wrote the screenplay for his debut feature film, Conversations With Other Women, a razor-sharp duel of words between two former lovers, starring Helena Bonham Carter.
“The observations about love and sex and time and memory are uncommonly sharp and true,” one critic wrote, “so much so that you may feel at times that Dick Cheney has bugged your intimate conversations and provided them to Zevin for her screenplay.” They also collaborated on a film adaptation of Zevin’s 2014 bestseller The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, which is set in a bookshop, and Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, which translocated one of her early young-adult novels to Japan.
Apart from her official website (where you can play a game of EmilyBlaster and create your own avatar), Zevin’s online presence is minimal. She’s said that the characters people play online in a game can be the best version of themselves. On social media, of course, the reverse is often true.
“Part of it is that we are really still so very young when it comes to existing on social media at all,” she says. “Being a good citizen and a good person on the internet actually is quite challenging. I think for a period of time people thought, ‘Oh, if I’m kind of an asshole online that’s okay, because I’m good in my real life.’ But it turns out if you’re an asshole online, you’re probably being an asshole just generally as well.”
Politicised platforms such as Twitter have also made the separation between an author and their work irretrievably blurred. “Overall, I think the less you know about me going into reading one of my books, the better. And I would prefer to read a book not knowing exactly where the writer stands politically or knowing where their opinions precisely align with mine or don’t.
“It’s not that I don’t think it’s useful to know anything about a writer, but when the discussion becomes only about the background of this person and whether they are fit to tell this story, that is possibly limiting for the reader of fiction. Who the writer is — that’s not the most important consideration for me.”
In March, Zevin wrote a rare personal essay for the Guardian about her elderly dog Frank, who she found at a rescue shelter for pugs in 2014. He’s sat by her side through the writing of three novels. Now, she has to lift him on to the couch and Canosa spends long spans of time in the yard, waiting for Frank to find the right moment to attend to his toilet, holding him up if he loses his balance. “Who has been closer to me – literally – than Frank?” she wrote. “Who has been a more consistent presence and source of support?”
Although Zevin and Canosa have been together for more than 25 years, they’ve never married. When she wrote about that for the New York Times in 2017, the article ran with this title: “The Secret to Marriage is Never Getting Married”. For me, the big reveal in her essay is that one of their favourite TV shows was Flight of the Conchords, but reader comments were vitriolic. Zevin couldn’t possibly know anything about love when she wasn’t married and didn’t have children. “I’d just turned 40 and I knew that likely children were not going to be in my life in that way. But the person who’s reading that piece doesn’t know if that’s a great hardship to me. They don’t know anything about me, really.”
I ask if the gameplay paradigm appeals to her, the ability to reboot life and alter its course. The tragedy of human beings is that time is lived in one direction, she says. “There are some mistakes that you can’t correct. We do just move forward relentlessly.
“I did, at one point in my life, have this funny dream that if I could wake up back in college and make all my choices again, would I do so? And what really stressed me out was the thought of having to try to remember word for word the books I hadn’t yet written. I realised that’s just a smaller metaphor for the difficulty of ever truly going back and choosing anything differently.”
Zevin was still at high school in Florida when she made her professional debut, submitting a Guns N’ Roses review to a local newspaper that then hired her as a teen consultant.
Her first young-adult novel, Elsewhere, was published when she was 25.
Writing books across a span of so many years is like living with ghosts of yourself, she says. Young Jane Young, published in 2017, is a nuanced response to the way Monica Lewinsky was vilified for her affair with Bill Clinton — a cautionary tale for women of Zevin’s age. “I feel enormously happy she’s gotten to revisit that story. She represents something very different now than she represented in the late 90s.”
After her trip to Australia and New Zealand (four festivals in 14 days), she’s off again on a second UK tour. Then, after what will have been a year on the road, she’ll settle back into writing mode. She’s already submitted several draft scripts for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, grappling with the seemingly infeasible challenge of condensing such a complex novel spanning three decades into a 90-minute feature film. When Zevin first handed over the manuscript, she told her film rights agent it would make a good limited series. Reading between the lines, I’d guess that’s not completely off the table.
Who’ll play the lead roles is another intriguing question. Both Sam and Marx are mixed-race Asian Americans, and Sadie, who’s from Los Angeles, is Jewish. As Zevin points out, the days have passed when non-Asians would be cast in those parts. “I think that’s the challenge and the excitement of it,” she says. “Even 10 years ago, I don’t know I would have had the belief that a story starring somebody who looked like me would attract so much attention. So there are ways in which the film industry has changed to accommodate more kinds of storytellers, including me.”
• Gabrielle Zevin will be at the Auckland Writers Festival talking about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow on May 19.
