"To write books across many years is to live with ghost versions of yourself"

An interview with author, Gabrielle Zevin

Last week, I had a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable conversation with the LA-based author, Gabrille Zevin about her 2022 novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which I evangelised about here last year.

Gabrielle Zevin (Photo by Hans Canosa)

Zevin, 45, is the author of 10 novels, including The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry as well as books for children. Tomorrow was an instant New York Times bestseller and a word of mouth hit here in the UK last year. Film rights to the book have been acquired so Zevin is currently writing the screenplay which is Very Exciting News.

When talked about the lure of platonic love, why you can’t write youth well until you’re older, the challenges of success and much more. I hope you enjoy it.

***WARNING: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW***

Why do you write what you write? 

In the case of this particular book, it was an idea I had 5 years before and I started researching and I quit it several times and finally, the motivation was the pandemic. I thought, if we’re not going to survive and I only get to write one more book and there’s no more publishing, then I want to solve this book. I had these two characters and they were stuck in a train station for a really long time and not really moving. And I thought, I want to know about these people. That’s the thing that maybe motivates me. When I started out, there would be ideas that I had that were really big but I had no ability to execute them. There’s a part in the book when Sadie talks about the long period between your taste and your ability and these two things do not align right away - that was certainly true for me. 

The older I’ve gotten, the less I’m impressed by cynical people and things so to me, it’s no proof of a great intellect to prove that the world is terrible, even though sometimes we act as if it is. In the face of an imperfect universe, the things that motivate me are the desire to make art and love people as much as I can and to make work that says that. That’s not very firm or definitive but it’s mostly love and a little ambition. There’s a pleasure to knowing that you’ve worked a really long time to be good at something and to think you’ve gotten to a place where you can do it well. 

From interviews I’ve read where you talk about your life, both Sam and Sadie both seem to embody aspects of your own history and character. Which of them felt like a closer proxy for you (if you even see it that way)?

When you write the first book - and this was my tenth - you basically just draw from your life. Yes, Sam and Sadie are links from me, but I’m also the centre from which every character in the book comes. Sam’s background is very similar to mine [his character is half Jewish, half Korean like Zevin] so that gives us an affinity and for Sadie, I share with her what it is to be a woman with a career in the arts.

Sometimes, I’ll be reading online and there’s a certain kind of person who loves the book who will say how much they hate Sadie. And I think to myself, that’s because you are very uncomfortable with the topic of female ambition. So since the book has been published, I feel closer to Sadie or more protective of her because I know what it is to be 20, to not have yourself figured out, to want to do big things. 

10 books in, having played in lots of different ways with derivations of yourself, does that get you any closer to understanding yourself?

I think it probably does. This year, they’re preparing one of my older books for an audio version so I had to go through the text again and it was like reading the book of a stranger. I recognised that person, that’s somebody I knew, but it didn’t feel like me currently. I felt like the person who wrote that book was somewhat ungenerous toward everyone else in a way that I don’t think I am now.

Time has allowed me to see all the ages of life more clearly. When you’re 7 years old, you’re an expert in the ages around 7 and everybody else is just old. But as you get older and you see people you love get old, you start to see more nuance about all the ages of humans. 

For a long time, especially in my books for adults, I was always writing about people who were older than myself and in a way, I really didn’t have an ability to write about being young until I was a little bit older. So this is very much a book about youth but it’s from a retrospective point of view of somebody who is now not young. Sometimes I’ll see a novel about young people written by a young person and they seem a bit myopic. It’s hard to understand the thing when you’re in it.

This novel is so romantic without actually being a romance. How did you navigate that line? Did you ever think about Sam and Sadie ending up together?

I thought about everything for Sam and Saide because that’s my job. But I knew early on that I was drawn to writing a new kind of story. I had written something for the New York Times’ Modern Love column and it was called, The Secret to Marriage is Never Getting Married. I had nothing to do with the headline and everybody instantly hated me upon the publication. Of course, I don’t have the secret to anything. The column was just a little personal thing that was about how my partner and I had been together for 25 years at that point but had never married. I wasn’t trying to prescribe anything for anyone else’s life but immediately the response was like, Gabrille Zevin doesn’t know anything about love or marriage because she hasn’t had children. And I remember thinking when that happened, how very sad that was because you don’t know why I don’t have children.

At that point, I was at an age where I realised that children were probably not going to be in my life, but an outside person doesn’t know if that’s a great sadness or what have you - but I came to realise that there are only so many kinds of love that we are given in a lifetime and we should be grateful to any of the ones that show up. So anyone telling you that you don’t know what love is because X is being very cruel. 

I did want to write a story for people who aren’t going to have the kind of ending we’ve been beaten down to expect. Even in the most literary novels that I’ve loved, they often push towards marriage or a baby - things we think are productive. I wanted to write a book that had a great sense of romance and the romance was creation but the children weren’t going to be children, they were going to be the art that these two people made.

A perfect book cover

There are some really interesting conversations about subjects like cultural appropriation (I’m thinking about Ichigo) -  are there certain issues that you know you want to tackle when you’re planning out a novel like this?

I’ve long since given up on the idea that fiction can be a vehicle for social change. I don’t believe I can convince audiences of anything so I’m not writing in a pedagogical mode in any sense. But if I choose to address something, I think organically, it has something to do with what the characters are experiencing. To me, if you’re somebody who has been creating art in the last 30 years, you have bumped up against the appropriation issue. It seemed natural to me to think about it. What really interested me was the idea that you could be on the right side of something in 1997 and the wrong side of it in say 2012. That’s something I had experienced. 

To write books across many years is to live with ghost versions of yourself, people who don’t necessarily share the same opinions as you. People who are not artists can plausibly deny that they thought such and such a thing at such and such a time but if you’re somebody who publishes things, you cannot deny you felt like that.

The thing that I love about the subject of video games is that it’s this great big magnet that attracts everything to it. So you could be writing about video games and be writing about gun violence. All the things are within this big topic and that’s something I look for. I certainly didn’t create Sam with my identity to talk about appropriation - it happened organically. 

Marx’s death - which was utterly heartbreaking - is highly conceptual and is followed by the immersive video game chapter (Pioneer). The consensus from my Book Club was that the chapter was challenging but ultimately rewarding! How did you hit upon such an experimental approach and was it difficult to execute? 

Not at lot surprises me when it comes to how people react to my work. I knew people would be resistant to Pioneer. What you have to do when you try something is make it worth it for the reader to have gone there. Some people will resist forever but there’s part of me that likes that struggle. If you go with me, it connects you with the material in an even more immersive and deep way. So with the NPC [Non Playable Character] section, I knew I wanted to do that. I’d experimented with second person before - it’s the foundation on which early video games are based - so I wanted to do that but I also wanted to play with the idea of what an NPC was. Marx is this secondary character, we don’t really get access to his internal thoughts. I wanted to write about all the people, in the process of making art, who are not the artist but can be artistic and creative. When you start out in a career in the arts, you don’t necessarily think about that. As a novelist, you think about the only name on the book which is yours when in fact, there are so many people who need to go out and say, this is worth reading. It’s so many people. In this once character, I wanted to do that. Formally, I struggled over it because I knew it would be such a big choice that it would need to be so emotional to make it worthwhile.

That NPC section was fun to write because it was hard. I went over that and Pioneers  more than any other section of the book because if you’re going to take a big swing at something, you have to land it. But I think fiction is meant to make you resist sometimes. As a young novelist, it was really humiliating to me any time I was misunderstood and as you go on in your career, you realise that part of the contract is that if you make things, the chance of not being understood by a bunch of people is part of the deal. And then you decide, why am I going to do this anyway? 

I was actually somewhat empowered by the pandemic because I felt more alone in the process than I had since I wrote my first novel and I remember thinking that I did not believe that a good book was a book you could not find a fault with. Some people on the internet write as if that’s the thing, as if nothing is meant to bother or perturb you in any way. 2020 was a terrible year in many ways but a good year as a writer because that solitude was very liberating. 

The narrative about gaming as an art form has shifted so much over the years. Why do you think that is?

It takes a while for anything to be viewed as an art. If you think even about TV, up until even a decade ago, people were like, TV is garbage. And then all of a sudden, Peak TV shows up and we’re all like, TV is really good. So I think that some of it is just time. If you look at the history of video games, you look at Pong and its minimalism, and you compare it with The Last Of Us which comes out in 2013 and it’s as complicated a narrative as any novel and it looks like a movie. I think there is an evolution that happens which makes it more interesting to speak about. 

I actually think there is a fundamental understanding from people about what games are. Almost everybody is a gamer, that’s the truth. Everybody has played in their life in some way. To many, a gamer is some guy shouting misogynistic insults wearing a headset. I never called myself a gamer - I’ve played games for 40 years, my dad was a computer programmer, it was a storytelling medium that I turned to with a great deal of passion - but in every single book I wrote and every interview I gave until 2022, there is no mention of gaming. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting to me, it’s that I never thought there would be anything in it for me to talk about it.

In the US, something like 50 million people play games for several hours a week and more than 50% of gamers are women. A lot of people are playing Wordle, which by the way, is an incredibly romantic game designed by a guy for his wife. I love that. If you are on Instagram or any social media network, you are playing a game. It’s not necessarily a good game but you’re certainly creating a character there and you’re in the pursuit of the modest rewards of likes or engagement. 

How is the film adaptation of Tomorrow going?

I have been working on a script for a while. It’s quite difficult because it doesn’t want to crunch itself down to a movie but we want to make it so absorbing that you feel swept up in the ways movies used to do. I have partners in the studio and my producers who are very committed to being faithful to what the book is. I do love that in a perfect world, you have to watch a movie for three hours and you can’t look away. There are few things that can absorb us that way.

Do you have a new book in the works?

When a book starts to do really well, as this one has, the promotion never ceases. So it started about 3 months before the book came out and now there is always one more thing. I’m thinking about a book in my head and I have notes on it.

I suppose you do want to revel in this book’s success.

I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who can revel. There’s part of me that never feels it. Failure seems to linger for me a lot more than success does. I’ve written 10 books and 3 of them have done well. You have to learn to be good at failing. It can be a creative place if you’ll allow it to be. I know the reaction to this book has been somewhat rare so I have wanted to prolong and do what I can to assist it in the world. 

Can you recommend a book you enjoyed recently?

I read Babel by R.F Kuang over the holidays and she’s a really impressive fantasy writer. It’s so much about how we communicate and how language controls power. She’s 26 years old and it will be really amazing to see what she comes up with next

How about a film?

This is probably such a cliche but I really loved The Banshees of Inisherin, not because it’s about the Troubles in Ireland but because I think really it’s about depression and how overnight, it can turn you against the people you love. I’ve never seen a movie that’s so profound on the subject of what it is to be depressed. 

And, of course, a video game?

My go to game recommendation is probably still The Last of Us because it’s such a poetic thing if you can get over the amount of killing you have to do. It’s about zombies, ostensibly, but really, it’s about a beautiful, empty America. It is dark and it is intelligent but it’s not cynical. The people who made it want to see the beauty in the ruined world. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is out now