You know that friend? The one you can not talk to for six months, then pick up the phone and it’s like no time has passed at all? The one you’ve built a thousand inside jokes with, who knows the weird landscape of your brain almost better than you do? That’s the feeling that Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow captures so perfectly. It’s not just a book I read; it’s one I felt. It’s a story that lives in my head now, popping up whenever I think about the people I’ve created things with.
Let’s get the plot out of the way, but honestly, the plot isn’t even the point. Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital—one a patient, one a visitor—and bond over a shared Nintendo game. They have a falling out (as kids do), and then years later, they bump into each other on a crowded train platform in Boston. That chance meeting sparks a creative partnership that leads them to start a video game company together. We follow them through decades of success, failure, heartbreak, and brilliance.
But if I tell you it’s a book about two people who make video games, I’ve failed you completely. The games are just the language they speak. The real story is about the terrifying vulnerability of creating something and offering it to someone else. It’s about the kind of love that exists in the space between romance and friendship, a space that’s somehow deeper and more fragile than both. It’s about how collaboration can feel like putting your whole soul in someone else’s hands and hoping they don’t drop it.
Why does this Gabrielle Zevin novel hit so hard right now? I think it’s because so many of us are trying to connect, to make meaning, in a world that can feel incredibly isolating. We understand the desire to build something that outlasts us, whether it’s a career, a project, or a relationship. Zevin gets that. She writes about the magic of late-night brainstorming sessions, the sting of a creative disagreement, and the sheer, world-altering power of having someone believe in your weird little idea. It’s a literary analysis of the human heart disguised as a story about gamers.
This book is full of lines that made me put it down just to stare at the wall for a minute. There’s one, spoken by their friend Marx, that I think about all the time:
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
Isn’t that everything? It’s the hope we all carry, the reason we get up and try again after a bad day.
And then there’s the line that absolutely wrecked me, a quiet observation about loneliness:
“He knew: the only thing worse than being truly alone was being with someone who made you feel alone.”
Oof. Right? It’s one of those quotes from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that articulates something you’ve felt but never had the words for.
Final Reflection: Reading this book felt like receiving a gift. It didn’t just tell me a story; it shifted my perspective. It made me want to text my old college roommate and thank her for all those nights we spent writing terrible poetry together. It made me appreciate the beautiful, complicated, and utterly non-romantic partnerships that have shaped my life. Why you should read this book isn’t for the gaming lore—it’s for a profound reminder that the most important things we build aren’t worlds on a screen, but the connections we nurture with the people who play alongside us.
So, I’m curious: who’s that person for you? Who’s the person you’ve built entire worlds with, even if those worlds were just shared daydreams on a playground?