Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin. Vintage Books (ISBN: 9780593466490) 2022.

Summary: Childhood friends, Sam and Sadie collaborate as game developers, in a different kind of love story.

From the ancient Greeks to C. S. Lewis, people have written of the different kinds of love. This is a story of a different kind of love. One that is not familial, nor one simply of friendship, nor erotic. Sadie meets Sam when they are both eleven. Sadie’s sister is being treated for cancer. Sam is recovering from surgery to try to put together his left foot, mangled in a car accident. One that took the life of his mother. She meets him in the hospital game room during one of those interminable times of waiting around when someone you care for is in the hospital. He’s really good at Super Mario Brothers. And they strike up a friendship.

Only later does she learn from a nurse that this is the first time he has spoken since the accident. So the nurse asks if Sadie would continue to visit. Her mother reminds her of the service requirement for her Bat Mitzvah. So surreptitiously, she gets credit for her time visiting Sam–over 600 hours! And they deeply connect, Grok, if you will, until Sam learns that she has counted her time with him for her service project. He cruelly ends the relationship until…

They run into each other seven years later in Harvard Square. She is a student at MIT, and he, at Harvard. Sam spots her and manages to get her attention by calling out a favorite phrase from their gaming discussions. She is delighted to see him and hands him a floppy disk of a game she has written for a class. And so resumes the complicated friendship of Sadie and Sam.

Sam plays the game and loves it. They talk, and conclude that they ought to work on games together. They develop a game, Ichigo, in which a genderless child tries to survive being swept to sea in a giant wave. Sam’s roommate, Marx, offers their apartment as a workspace, and helps support the effort with everything from food to promotional ideas.

Sam and Sadie’s collaboration makes each of them, and the game better. There is a kind of oneness of mind between them that is more than close friends or even lovers, which they never become. Sadie’s lover was a former prof, Dov, a brilliant game developer who also had a penchant for sado-masochism. Sadie eventually gets out of the relationship, but not before securing permission to use Dov’s game engine to create visual effects for the game. Sam had urged this on her, oblivious to what he was asking. And so begin the tensions between them that intensify when they try to sell the game to a company that wants to make Ichigo male. Ideas of success and creative tensions pull at the collaboration, which Marx, now their business manager tries to hold together.

Then game promotion complicates things. Sadie’s insecurity comes out and Sam is the one on the stages promoting the game, and treated as its creator in the male world of gaming. While he gives Sadie due credit, press perceptions still represent Ichigo as his game, even though it was significantly an expression of Sadie’s genius and developing skills. And it is wildly successful. A sequel is developed, and Sam, Sadie, and Marx use their profits to create their own company.

Gabrielle Zevin traces this complicated friendship over 30 years as they build a company and do amazing creative work. Yet Sam drives himself so hard that his cobbled-together foot becomes infected, jeopardizing his life. Sadie and Sam create a “two worlds” game. Sadie’s side is technically brilliant, but it is Sam’s more prosaic side to which people flock. While creating non-violent games, an act of real world violence devastates both of them, and their company, and further drives them apart.

The title, quoted by Marx from Shakespeare, alludes to the allure of games, in which no character ever dies permanently. They keep coming back with each new game play. Both are haunted by death. Each asks if the other is dying when they first meet. Sam witnesses a woman jump from a building, landing in front of him and his mother walking on the sidewalk. Sam’s mother, on the cusp of success in Hollywood, dies when another driver fails to see them parked on the side of a road at night. Then, in the time following the act of violence, we wonder whether the unique love between Sadie and Sam will be stronger than death.

I am not into the gaming world, and my world is a far cry from the one Zevin creates. Yet the compelling characters and their unique, fraught relationship drew me in. Zevin offers an exploration of what an intellectual, creative, and yet deeply bonded love that is non-sexual might look like. She subtly underscores the toxic masculinity of the gaming industry, and the flaws in a society that believes in solving problems with a gun. It does not surprise me that Zevin is the recipient of numerous book awards. I will be on the lookout for her next work.