Author Gabrielle Zevin.Hans Canosa/Penguin Random House Canada
If you thought American author Gabrielle Zevin wrote the bestselling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow just for you, she didn’t.
But she gets that reaction a lot to her latest book, which has sold more than three million copies worldwide.
“When I finished writing the book, I gave it to my partner, and he said, ‘Oh, you wrote this for me.’ And I said, ‘No, I wrote this one for me.’ And then I gave it to my agent, who’s a very different kind of person, and he had the same response,” says Zevin. “I’ve heard that now thousands of times from all kinds of people.”
The way that all kinds of people have seen themselves in these characters – two best friends coming of age, their rise in the gaming industry, the highs and lows of their friendship, and the trials and tribulations that come their way – has been an “amazing and unusual thing” for Zevin to observe.
“There are certain things in life – emotions, relationships – that are underserved by novels,” she says. “I feel glad I was able to express something that maybe so many people feel, but for whatever reason was not fully expressed in a book for them before.”
Penguin Random House Canada
Since it was published in 2022, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow became a top international bestseller for months and featured on several ‘Best Book of the Year’ lists. Paramount Pictures is working on bringing the book to the big screen after it bought the feature-film rights to the novel for US$2-million.
But the bestselling book isn’t Zevin’s first brush with literary success. She also wrote four other adult novels, including The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, another bestseller that has been translated into more than 30 languages, plus several books for young adults.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, however, is an entirely different stratosphere of critical and commercial acclaim, to the point where it’s not uncommon for people to incorrectly refer to this book as her “debut.”
“This couldn’t have been my debut because I wouldn’t have known enough to write it,” she says. “So much of this book is about the ups and downs of creative life, success and failures.”
The 46-year-old author spoke with The Globe and Mail about her book on a recent visit to Toronto.
Has the response to this book surprised you? Or did you have some sense as you were writing it that it would be a hit?
I’m of two minds when I’m writing a book. There’s the part of you that thinks everything you do will fail, and there’s the part of you that thinks everything will be a wild success. With this book, I started writing it in 2018, but I wrote the bulk of it during the pandemic. That was a terrible time for almost everything, but it was a good time for being a novelist, because I was able to feel more alone with my work than I had felt since probably my first novel. I had this sense that I had a lot of tools that I had about how to write a novel, but I also had a kind of innocence about what the perception would be.
When you talk about being alone with this book, are you talking about being free of, ‘My publisher will want this’ or ‘I had really good feedback from the fans on that’ crowding around you as you write?
To be honest, I could care less about my publisher. I love them, they’re very important, but if you look across my career, probably to my detriment, I’ve never written the same book twice. Anytime I’ve found a little in-road to success, I’ve been like, “Let’s never do that again.” [Laughs]
That really wasn’t the thing. It’s a kind of delusion to pretend there isn’t an audience after your first novel, so the awareness of that reader and their experiences is something I think about a lot, and that maybe I began to factor in too much. I wanted everyone to understand exactly what I was doing. But, as an artist, it’s important to put things out there that have a risk of being misunderstood. In this case, I was okay with that. I remember getting to the end of the book and thinking that no matter what happened with it, I had written the book that I wanted to write.
There’s a part in the book where I talk about the long period of time where one’s tastes and abilities don’t align entirely. That was something I felt, but that felt less true with this one, that I’d finally come closer to those two points meeting. That’s an amazing thing for me to say if you know how very externally motivated I am as an individual. I crave the validation! It’s easy to say this now that the book has sold quite a few million copies, but I remember thinking it at the time, and really meaning it.
We talk a lot about learning from failure, but what have you learned from the success of this book?
Does success teach anyone anything good? I don’t know that we learn much from success. What’s the takeaway? “That one worked, let’s do that again.” I don’t find success to be as interesting. I love it, don’t get me wrong. It’s funny that I’m struggling to articulate what is good about success.
I think I feel a faith in readers that I don’t know that I always felt before. Somebody asked me recently about the worst writing advice I’ve ever heard. It’s all kind of terrible, but one that I think is particularly bad is “kill your darlings.” We know what it means – don’t fall in love with that one thing – but I want to read books that are all darlings.
We should cultivate darlings because they are uniquely the people who write them. I think I felt for many years that people did not want the books that are uniquely me. I didn’t think I was doing it, but I didn’t have a faith that people would want to read a story about a half-Jewish, half-Korean artist, which is what I am. And I think the success of me has taught me is that the books I want to read as a reader, and which readers seem to want, are the books that are most reflective of individual experiences.
This interview has been edited and condensed.