‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ author Gabrielle Zevin

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast podcast episode: ‘“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” author Gabrielle Zevin’

Lilah Raptopoulos
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There’s a book I recently loved called Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s the story about two friends, a boy named Sam, and a girl named Sadie, who meet as kids and bond over playing video games. When they get older, they reconnect and they build a whole video game empire together. And in turn, we as readers end up going on a 30-year journey with them. Here’s how Gabrielle describes it.

Gabrielle Zevin
It’s about these two people who make video games together, and they’re the most important people in each other’s lives. But they are not married and they don’t have children. All they do is make their art. And it’s about, I think, figuring out exactly what that relationship is, you know. And it is also about video games and the last, I think, 30 years of video game history becoming a sort of shadow history for the last 30 years of just living in America as an artist and a person.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow came out last year and it was an instant bestseller. First, my friends in publishing started telling me about it, and then my friends outside of publishing started telling me about it. And I get why everyone loves it. It’s written for a generation that has always played video games, that remembers Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Minesweeper. I personally had never considered myself a gamer, but when I started reading this book, I realised that actually maybe I was.

I got these flashbacks of being a kid in a computer lab playing Oregon Trail, this game where you’re trying to settle the American west and not die of dysentery. And also memories of entire Sundays going by, and the only thing I had to show for it was building like some epic city in SimCity.

Gabrielle Zevin
The first generation of people to play video games as children were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We call them the Oregon Trail generation because they were likely to have played Oregon Trail in a computer lab . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
At school . . .

Gabrielle Zevin
In a school somewhere . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Right.

Gabrielle Zevin
I know. And you know, what was interesting to me was that generation of people was now — which includes myself and includes Sam and Sadie, who are the main characters in the book — were now turning into their forties and fifties, and I just kind of had the question for myself, like, how was, you know, life as it is lived, changed by having had video games in your life for your whole life?

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, Gabrielle tells me why she decided to write Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and why games are an interesting lens to look at ourselves through. Then I speak with FT contributor Jeff Maysh about Rolex watches. There’s a Rolex bubble right now and Jeff thinks it’s crypto’s fault. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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I have to admit that in order to introduce you to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I just used a very cheap trick that a lot of journalists and critics have been using, too. I lured you in by telling you, don’t worry, I don’t play video games, and I loved the book. So you don’t have to either.

Gabrielle Zevin
I’ve read some online reviews of it, of which there have been many, many, many, many online reviews. And almost all of them start with, you know, a sort of manifesto about whether one is a gamer or not.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. (Laughter)

Gabrielle Zevin
But I actually also find that to be quite strange. You know, you don’t read, like, All the Light We Cannot See, and, you know, you’re like, “Hey, I was never in World War II”. (Lilah laughs) But, you know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The thing is, like most really good literature, Gabrielle’s novel is really about people in the same way a book about World War II is about people. Specifically, it’s about a pair of friends trying to cope with the hand that life dealt them. And they use video games to do it. When Sam and Sadie meet again as young adults, Sadie’s at MIT and Sam’s at Harvard. They’re smart, they’re really smart, but they’re struggling. And they reconnect so quickly that they decide to just skip college and make a video game together instead. When the game takes off and makes them famous, that becomes their life — working together to make some of the most influential video games in the world.

I’d be curious how you would distil why we turn to games and what’s unique about them and how they help us.

Gabrielle Zevin
Well, I can talk about the characters in the book because when I started writing them, I asked myself, like, who games, and why do they game? You know, it’s, I knew very clearly why Sam and Sadie both game. In the case of Sadie, her sister almost dies, you know, and I think in a way, for her, games are a way to grapple with mortality. And so I think they become a core part of her, you know. And I think for Sam, it’s that because he, you know, his mother dies when he’s quite young, but it’s also because through games he can have a perfect body that is perfectly functional. He’s a person who is not always, that is not always comfortable in his body. And so I thought, you know, that would be a reason to game. That would be a motivating thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s based around this relationship between Sam and Sadie through the course of their lives. So it’s sort of this expansive novel about decades together. Like, were you like, I wanna write a book about the relationship between these two people and I’ll use games as a vehicle, or . . . What were you thinking as you were beginning the book?

Gabrielle Zevin
Yeah, I think, you know, there are a lot of ideas and not all of them are worth following. And, you know, I had the idea that I wanted to write something about video games, but the fact is, you don’t actually have a book until you have some people in it, you know? And so for me, it was definitely, I knew this idea, but I didn’t have a novel until I had these people.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What felt good to you about writing them?

Gabrielle Zevin
You know, for me, because I’m not a video game designer, there were ways in which I was able to speak about a lot of the things in the profession that I know, which is novel writing, and a lot of the things I know about my life, like I gave Sam, you know, Sam and I share an ethnic background, for instance, or things like that. I put it in cities that I had always, that I had lived in, you know. And I wrote a lot of the book during the pandemic, and I can see, in sort of the descriptions of places like an almost palpable sensuality, because I’m so longing for these places that you couldn’t, like, visit anymore.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sam and Sadie care about each other a lot. They also fight a lot. Usually pride gets in the way and they can’t admit it. Sometimes they have bad months, even bad years. It’s a unique kind of romance.

I was really moved to see a relationship in the novel between people who were making something together, like the intimacy of being in each other’s heads. I often feel that creatively with my team sort of, even making this show, like when you’re trying to do something complicated and you can anticipate what the other person’s about to say, and I’m mad at them about it for a second, and then you’re over it and you have this shorthand, and it’s a lot of trust. Did you feel that that was missing from, or were there other pieces of art like that that inspired you?

Gabrielle Zevin
I mean, I looked for them. It’s funny because I’m often called upon now to make lists of similar novels, (Lilah laughs) you know, or things like stories of work, stories of friendship. And it’s actually amazing, relatively to the, like, millions of novels we have, how few of them are about anything but sort of romantic love, you know. I did want to depict that because I think we are all kinds of people living all kinds of lives, you know? And I think there have to be stories about other kinds of things.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What appeals to me about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is that it takes on these very modern questions. Questions like: is the kind of love that counts in our society changing? But also questions like: how do you be a good person today? We’re already living half of our lives online under avatars of ourselves. That version of us is no less us, and our lives are real. They’re not games. So how do we show up?

I’ve heard you speak about how the book rests on this tension between the perfect worlds that Sadie and Sam are trying to build in games and the imperfect world that we live in. And you said in one interview that for you, the big question was: how do we live in the world when sometimes living in the world seems awful?

Gabrielle Zevin
(Laughter) I mean, it’s a question for me. I think the hardest thing I hold on to as a thinking person is how to maintain optimism in the face of reality. And yeah, it’s that coexist with the fact that as I’ve gotten older, I do not find cynicism an interesting quality, you know. I’m less and less attracted to cynical people and cynical things, you know, with every, with every year that passes. But yeah, I think that is what the book is about. And I think, you know, for those of us that are in the arts or writers or creative, I think one of the ways you live in the world is maybe, you know, you try to make, you know, art that makes sense of it to some extent.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I was thinking about sort of like what the existential question or dilemma underlying the novel was, and how this title Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow kind of speaks to what it was for me, which is that, like, in games, you exist in a world that has very defined rules. And if you die or if you lose, you can kind of restart. And there’s always a tomorrow, and there isn’t like a long memory. But the world is more complicated than that. But also, what you learn from spending 30 years with someone over the course of this book and seeing the depths of their relationships, is that, like, it’s good to have memory. (Laughter)

Gabrielle Zevin
It is!

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like, actually there’s something sort of like that was sort of hopeful to me is that at the end of the day, like the fact that they couldn’t just run away and restart or whatever is actually what gives our lives depth and meaning.

Gabrielle Zevin
Right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I found that hopeful.

Gabrielle Zevin
I think it is hopeful. You know, I think, you know, obviously, the title comes from one of the bleakest speeches in all of Shakespeare. (Lilah laughs) It’s like Act V, Macbeth, and nothing good happens in Act V of Macbeth. (Lilah laughs) But for me, the more I thought about the idea of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the more I realised it wasn’t just games that had infinite restarts, you know. Like, yes, we have only finite time. But if you think about it, you take Sam and Sadie across their 30 years, and every day, like, they wake up, they have a chance to do better.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Gabrielle Zevin
You know, in terms of the existential dilemma of being human is that actually, even though we don’t have quite infinite lives, you know, we have a lot of chances, you know?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Gabrielle Zevin
And I think some of even Sam and Sadie’s conflict comes from the fact that they see each other across time, all the time, like they see every single bad thing that they’ve ever done to each other. They exist in kind of like a multiverse of (laughter) human experience, something, you know.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Gabrielle, my last question is just, you mentioned that even being on social media, even being on Facebook is, in a way, a game. I’m curious if you have thoughts about all the ways that our world has become gamified, even on social platforms. Getting likes gives us some sort of quantitative value that makes us feel like winning . . . 

Gabrielle Zevin
Right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . something when maybe we’re actually kind of winning nothing.

Gabrielle Zevin
No. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Maybe not. I’m curious what you think.

Gabrielle Zevin
I think they’re bad games, as I said. You know, just, we’re really, really young when it comes to the internet. We don’t think we are, but we are. You know, my first novel, published in 2005, which coincidentally is, I think, the first year of YouTube, you know . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Gabrielle Zevin
I mean, so we had this idea and then Facebook doesn’t show up for like two years after that, you know. And so we have this idea that we’ve been at this a long time, but we actually haven’t been and I don’t think we’ve completely figured it out. The best way is to be people and to utilise these technologies on online, you know?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Gabrielle Zevin
So I mean, my hope is that we find better ways to be online. I don’t think that, you know, as we think about the metaverse and some of these concepts, I don’t think that being an online citizen requires you to be less moral. I think it requires you to be more so. I think online citizenship is going to be deeply challenging and it’s not something we really think about, that in fact, if you are not a good person in a virtual space, you are actually not being a good person, you know? (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Gabrielle, thank you so much. This is so thought-provoking.

Gabrielle Zevin
Thank you for having me.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Do you ever walk past those big jewellery store windows? You know, the ones that sell luxury brands like Harry Winston and Rolex. And imagine buying something. (Cash register ring) Have you ever gone and just tried stuff on just to see what tens of thousands of dollars feels like on your wrist? The journalist Jeff Maysh says that even holding something that expensive can be a very dramatic experience.

Jeff Maysh
If you’ve ever held a Rolex in your hand, it’s just, it’s, you kind of hear a distant quiet. (Heavenly sound effect) It’s like, oh, it’s like looking at a Ferrari or, it’s heavy. Everything just looks like it would last forever. And they do.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jeff is talking to me about Rolexes because he actually went out to buy one recently as a very nice gift for his wife. He had been eyeing this one called the Oyster Perpetual. His wife had seen ads for it and she really liked it. But he couldn’t find one.

Jeff Maysh
And so I thought, oh, just pop down to the local Rolex dealer to pick one up. So I pop down there, and of course, that’s when I discovered that everything was not as it should be.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) What happened?

Jeff Maysh
Well, the store was empty. There were no Rolex watches anywhere. It was almost like they’d just been held up at gunpoint. They hadn’t. So I started looking around with the other Rolex dealers, and all of the shop assistants told me the same thing: we don’t have any Rolexes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Jeff Maysh
And that just struck me as very bizarre. So, of course, I fell into a rabbithole online.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Here’s what’s going on. Rolex has always had fans. But recently, it’s become huge among people who made a lot of money on crypto. It’s true that crypto has had setbacks lately. But Jeff thinks that the crypto bubble has actually led to the Rolex bubble.

Jeff Maysh
Rolex told me that it’s a supply problem. They can’t up the creation of their watches because, you know, they’re delicate, you know, fascinating pieces of machinery. They can’t just mass produce these things. And of course, the economy has been on fire for the last few years, and there’s all these crypto pros out there. So their line is that it’s just a supply-and-demand situation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And what is your theory on why it’s happening? Is it just that people who’ve gotten rich really quickly want Rolexes in particular, like these kind of nouveau riche crypto guys fixating on one object? Or is it like growing global wealth, looking for western status symbols or . . . ?

Jeff Maysh
I think it’s a bit of both, and I think crypto is so volatile and Rolexes just hold their value and appreciate in value.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Jeff Maysh
I think if you’re a high-net-worth individual and you’re looking to diversify your portfolio, holding a collection of Rolexes is a really smart move to go along with your art collection and whatever else you have.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you started looking into it and with your sort of journalist cap on, and what did you find first?

Jeff Maysh
I found that there was a thriving grey market for Rolex watches. Not a black market. These aren’t stolen.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Jeff Maysh
This is legitimate, authenticated Rolexes that you can buy for two, three, four, 10 times the retail price. But you have to go through these shady middlemen, these websites and, you know, smaller jewellery stores, people in the know, friends of friends.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Jeff Maysh
And I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but most importantly, I wanted to find my wife a Rolex in time for her birthday.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Laughter) Here’s what Jeff was seeing specifically. Individual people were selling Rolex watches online at a huge mark-up. Those watches had all the certifications. They had this special Rolex sticker on it that apparently is really hard to remove and it tells you if it’s real or not. And they had all the paperwork that comes with authenticated watches. So what he wanted to know was how were these dealers getting real Rolex watches? That led him to a court case in Chicago. He thinks this case is our best way of understanding how the Rolexes get diverted from the authorised market to the grey market.

Jeff Maysh
So in this lawsuit that’s bubbling away out in Chicago, three former employees of this official Rolex dealership claim that there was a scheme going on in the store where a rogue employee was buying the watches herself secretly using her own credit card and then selling them at a great profit through the grey market in Asia. And that, to me, explained why there were no Rolex watches in the dealership that I went into. And I get it. It makes perfect sense. So I write a lot about criminal conspiracies and schemes and scams. If you’re working in a Rolex store and you’re selling watches for retail of £5,000 and you know that you could sell it tomorrow for 10,000, you can find a way to, you know, buy and sell that yourself. It makes complete sense. I’m not saying that’s happening at every Rolex dealership, but it gives you an idea into the overall economic picture.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jeff, can you tell us a little bit more about what you learned about the case? Sort of, what was it alleging, what was happening?

Jeff Maysh
So according to this lawsuit in Chicago, CD Peacock, which is a really well-renowned jewellery store, just before the holiday sales rush in 2018, they got a new sales assistant, a Chinese student known as “Ying”, and she had no experience, but she suddenly started selling incredible amounts of Rolexes. They were flying out the store faster than they could get them in. So the other sales assistants started to smell a rat.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Okay. So it sounds like, so she’s doing that. And then it sounds like the management of the store was in on it, too. Is that right?

Jeff Maysh
Well, it seems like the owners and the management were also profiting because they get a commission from every sale. So there was absolutely no one that wanted to stop this from happening as long as everyone was making money that is.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
You’d think it would be good for Rolex that so many people want Rolexes, but it’s not. No luxury brand wants to be known for a sketchy grey market, and it’s only a matter of time before what you get there aren’t real Rolexes but black-market fakes. The big question for me, though, was big picture, should we be sad about this? What’s the big deal if Rolex loses its reputation?

Whenever a trusted brand is threatened like this, the question I’m kind of left with is like, what gave it value? And will this threat to its value make us rethink the value of other things or other things like it? How do you think about that?

Jeff Maysh
That’s a really deep question. (Lilah laughs) I think, you know, I’m not a designer guy. I don’t wear kind of Burberry scarves or things with big logos on. The reason I was drawn to the Rolex is because it’s just an awesome piece of machinery and it will last forever. It’s something I can hand down. And for me, we’re in this fast fashion moment at the moment where everything breaks. You buy trash off of the Internet, you buy a toaster, it breaks. After a year, you throw it away, it becomes landfill. I don’t know. Buying these watches just made me feel like I was making a break away from that into permanence and something that will last forever.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Maysh
Yeah. I think as we move away from, I think people, there’s gonna be a gut reaction to this landfill economy. And people are going to want things that last forever.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And so what gives that Rolex value is the fact that it will never be a thing you have to replace.

Jeff Maysh
Exactly. I mean, you have to service them, which I found out to my extreme costs because I had this for five years before I realised that you had to service it and it cost me $900 in parts. (Lilah laughs) So I should put that in there because, before people start to think that I’m some kind of watch investing genius . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Jeff Maysh
I really don’t know what I’m doing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jeff, what do you think is going to happen with Rolex?

Jeff Maysh
Well, in the months just before my article came out in the Financial Times, Rolex announced that they would be selling used second-hand authenticated Rolex watches through their official dealers, which is a move that is probably gonna kill off most of the grey market because you’d much rather buy that second-hand Rolex from an authorised dealer and get the warranty card and the certificate and the box rather than from some shady character in a back street in New York. I think this is like being forced into fixing the problem, and I’m pleased about that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what did you end up doing with, for your wife?

Jeff Maysh
We found . . . we couldn’t find an Oyster Perpetual, but we did find a Rolex Air-King, and she fell in love with it. It’s a man’s size, so it looked really cool on her wrist . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh cool.

Jeff Maysh
So she got something that’s a bit vintage and a bit cool and it, I think it really suits her.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jeff, this is fascinating. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Jeff Maysh
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Jeff writes a lot about scams. I’ve linked to this piece from the FT Weekend magazine and a few other of his popular ones in the show notes.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next week we are speaking with Tim Hayward. He’s the FT’s restaurant critic and he’s brilliant. And he’s gonna help us make sense of what’s going on in the fine dining world now that it has been so perfectly spoofed in the film The Menu, and now that Noma, the world’s top restaurant, has announced that it’s closing.

Don’t forget our survey, it takes 10 minutes. It’s in the show notes. You can win some headphones. if you want to say hi in other ways, you can also email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @FTWeekendPod and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. I post a lot about the show, behind-the-scenes stuff, culture stuff on my Instagram.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and special thanks go as always to the wonderful Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we will find each other again next week.

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