{"id":210,"date":"2024-07-13T18:33:56","date_gmt":"2024-07-13T18:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/?p=210"},"modified":"2026-08-04T23:52:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T23:52:25","slug":"tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-by-gabrielle-zevin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/?p=210","title":{"rendered":"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about two people who spend thirty years making video games together. There are a lot of games in it and Oregon Trail keeps coming back, but I’d call it a book about partnership more than a book about games. You don’t need to be a gamer to like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sam and Sadie first meet at eleven, in a hospital rec room. Sam is chronically ill and playing Super Mario Bros. Sadie is there visiting her sister. Years later they run into each other by chance in Cambridge, where Sadie is at MIT and Sam is at Harvard. They build a game called Ichigo and it rockets into a massive success. Their company, Unfair Games, takes off, and the two of them start to butt heads.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Zevin also gets what it’s like to build a company and then watch it work. Your idea is real now and other people believe in it, and instead of feeling finished you get a new set of problems. What happens to you and your cofounder once there are fifty other people in the building. How do you know the next thing you make will be as good as the last one. And what happens to the mission once the company is big enough to write it down. Nobody sits down and decides to give it up. You just say yes to a lot of reasonable things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The brilliance of the book comes from the relationships between its characters. Sam, Sadie, and Marx are written with great empathy and perception. The intimacy between them and the way they come together and apart felt so familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emily sent me these lines and I thought of M. “The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.<\/em>” I knew at 18 that we would never be friends, and I knew again at 21, but the love stayed and varied the entire time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sam’s optimism reminded me of my mom. “Despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core…is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn’t they be?<\/em>”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And on remembering. “Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion. Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?<\/em>”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about two people who spend thirty years making video games together. There are a lot of games in it and Oregon Trail keeps coming back, but I’d call it a book about partnership more than a book about games. You don’t need to be a gamer to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-library","category-school-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=210"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1089,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210\/revisions\/1089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lilygalbraith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}