Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow..

After reading all the books on my list, for the first time ever in my life, in beloved Gower St. Waterstones I decided to get this book, without even reading the back, only because it had a very beautiful cover. So glad I did.

Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow arrives disguised as a novel about video games. It quickly becomes something else entirely: an examination of collaboration, identity, grief, ambition, disability, and the peculiar intimacy that exists between two people who spend decades creating worlds together while struggling to understand one another within the real one.

The title itself reaches back four centuries to Shakespeare's Macbeth. In one of literature's bleakest soliloquies, Macbeth laments life as an endless procession of "tomorrows," each carrying humanity another step toward oblivion. Zevin borrows those words, yet she performs a remarkable inversion. Her novel does not deny suffering. Instead, it asks whether tomorrow continues to matter precisely because we are capable of creating something today. Creation becomes an act of resistance.

Every meaningful relationship in the novel is built upon a paradox.

Sam and Sadie understand one another more completely through the games they design than through ordinary conversation. They communicate with mechanics, environments, puzzles, and fictional characters more honestly than with language itself. Their games become emotional blueprints, preserving feelings neither knows how to articulate. It is an unsettling observation because it reflects modern life with uncomfortable precision. How often do people reveal themselves more completely through the things they create than through the things they say? A playlist. A photograph. A social media post. A painting. A line of code. A novel.

Creation has always functioned as a second language, one capable of expressing emotions that ordinary vocabulary leaves stranded.

Perhaps the novel's most fascinating idea is that collaboration resembles intimacy more than ownership.

Western culture celebrates individual genius. We prefer singular names attached to masterpieces. The lone novelist. The visionary director. The brilliant inventor.

Reality is rarely so tidy. Games are built by teams. Relationships are built by compromise. Identities themselves emerge through countless interactions with other people. Sam believes he is creating games. Sadie believes she is protecting her independence. Both gradually discover they have been creating each other. Every collaboration leaves fingerprints on the collaborators.

Memory functions strangely throughout the novel. Unlike nostalgia, which polishes the past into something cleaner than it was, Zevin presents memory as an unfinished save file. Every recollection changes depending on when it is revisited. Events refuse to remain fixed because the people remembering them continue to evolve.This is psychologically truthful.

Modern neuroscience increasingly understands memory not as retrieval but as reconstruction. Every act of remembering subtly rewrites the memory itself. We do not revisit the past unchanged; we carry our present selves backward into it. The novel mirrors this beautifully. Sam and Sadie spend years arguing over what truly happened between them, not because either is deliberately dishonest, but because experience itself has become unstable. Perhaps every long friendship eventually becomes two different stories attempting to occupy the same timeline.

Pain in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is never decorative. Physical disability, chronic pain, emotional trauma, artistic disappointment, and grief are not narrative obstacles designed merely to be overcome. They become structural components of identity. This distinction matters. Contemporary storytelling often treats suffering as a temporary interruption before personal growth. Zevin rejects this comforting formula. Pain remains present. It shapes careers, relationships, confidence, and perception long after its supposed ending. Healing is not portrayed as erasure. It is adaptation. The body remembers. So does the mind. The question is not whether suffering disappears. The question is whether life continues expanding around it.

Video games occupy an unusual cultural position. They invite participation rather than observation. The player fails. Repeats. Learns. Fails again.

Eventually succeeds. The loop itself becomes meaningful. Life offers no such convenient mechanics. There are no checkpoints after cruel conversations.

No option to reload before irreversible choices. No guarantee that every challenge has a solution. Yet games allow us to rehearse resilience within systems where persistence is rewarded. Perhaps this explains why they matter so deeply to the novel. Games cannot repair reality.

But they remind us that progress often consists of continuing after failure.

The most devastating conflicts in the novel emerge not from betrayal but from interpretation. Assumptions accumulate.

Silences harden. Unspoken fears become accepted truths. Psychologists have long described relationships as negotiations between internal models rather than objective reality. We rarely respond to another person exactly as they are. Instead, we respond to our evolving interpretation of them.

Sam and Sadie repeatedly love versions of one another that no longer exist. They grieve people who are still alive. They misunderstand intentions that remain invisible until years later. The tragedy is not their inability to care. It is their inability to communicate the shape that care has taken.

Perhaps the novel's most profound observation concerns authorship itself. Who writes a life? We imagine ourselves as protagonists directing every chapter through conscious choice. Yet circumstance, coincidence, illness, geography, economics, friendship, and timing continually revise the manuscript without permission. The illusion of complete control dissolves. What remains is authorship of response.Not every level is chosen.Only how one continues playing it.

The title ultimately returns with greater weight.

Tomorrow.

And tomorrow.

And tomorrow.

Macbeth heard repetition as evidence of futility. Zevin hears possibility.

Tomorrow is not valuable because it promises certainty. It is valuable because it permits another attempt.

Another conversation.

Another creation.

Another reconciliation.

Another unfinished game.

Perhaps the greatest worlds we build are never the digital ones displayed on screens.

Perhaps they are the invisible landscapes constructed over decades between people who repeatedly fail to understand one another, yet continue returning to the table, determined to build together anyway.

In the end, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is less interested in whether love survives time than whether creation does.

And maybe those two questions have always been the same.