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The novelist Gabrielle Zevin, whose Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow appeared on many of 2022’s books of the year lists, was born in New York in 1977. She studied English at Harvard, where she met her partner, the film director Hans Canosa. Zevin wrote the screenplay for Canosa’s 2005 film, Conversations With Other Women, and the pair adapted two of Zevin’s novels for the screen, most recently The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. She is working on a film version of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which follows two childhood friends as they reunite in adulthood to create video games. She lives in Los Angeles.
1. Visual art
Hauss is a French visual artist who works with ballpoint pens to create hyperrealistic drawings about pop culture and women’s sexuality. My partner came across her work on Twitter and I was immediately attracted to what I saw, so I sought her out on Instagram and bought one of her drawings. It’s of a woman in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit, but when you get close you realise she has bruised knuckles, like she’s just been in a fight. For me, Hauss is just a perfect artist.
2. Film
The Worst Person in the World (dir Joachim Trier, 2021)
I loved this film so much. It’s about time and mistakes and missed opportunities, and it has one of the most poetic sections on infidelity that I’ve ever seen in a movie, capturing the romance of feeling like time is stopping when you’re in love, but also the narcissism of having an affair, the way other people around you cease to be quite real. I’m about the same age as the director and it feels as if the canvas of his life must look something like my own. So this movie hits in a particular way because it feels like life as I lived it.
3. Video game
The Last of Us Part I (remastered version on PlayStation 5)
While researching my book, I asked a lot of people what were the games that moved them, and this game – about two people crossing America in the aftermath of a catastrophic pandemic – came up more than any other. I’m playing through the remastered version now, and though the new TV adaptation is brilliant, it does something that only a game can do. The beginning is so incredibly violent, but it turns out to be a meditation on violence, so when I play it, it does weird things to me. You’re killing things, and then you’re like, jeez, now I have to grapple with this moral toll on my virtual soul.
4. Album
69 Love Songs (1999) by the Magnetic Fields
This is a fantastic concept album featuring 69 love songs, all in different styles. I never sat down and listened to all three hours of it until recently and it’s just a great experience. [Lead singer] Stephin Merritt said it’s an album about love songs, not love, which is a really interesting distinction. But, that said, it has one of the most convincing and beautiful love songs of all time on it, The Book of Love. They played it on NPR [National Public Radio] recently and I was like: “Oh no, now I’m crying.”
5. Novel
Babel by RF Kuang
I don’t read a ton of fantasy, but I like this book because it’s really about language and the power that exists in the distance between a word and its translation. The world-building is really interesting as well. It’s about a boy in China in the 1830s whose mother dies and he’s swept away to England, where he’s trained to be a translator. I like that the book is angry and indignant. Kuang is 26 and I just have a sense that it’s the beginning of a fantastic career. She’s got a new book coming out soon called Yellowface.
6. TV
Tuca & Bertie (Netflix)
This is a TV animation created by the cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt. It’s a really complicated, surreal show about two friends who happen to be anthropomorphised birds. It says a lot of things about women and friendship, and other things too. Season three came out recently and there’s an episode called The One Where Bertie Gets Eaten By a Snake, which is as good a meditation on the pandemic as I’ve seen. The show was cancelled recently, and I’m quite sad because I would watch Tuca & Bertie for ever.
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