The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

by Gabrielle Zevin

In the end, we are collected works. He has read enough to know there are no collections where each story is perfect. Some hits. Some misses. If you’re lucky, a standout. And in the end, people only really remember the standouts anyway, and they don’t remember those for very long.

The original title of the book was THE COLLECTED WORKS OF A.J. FIKRY, but my American publisher worried that booksellers wouldn't know where to shelve the book -- they feared it would seem like a short story collection by A.J. Fikry, and not a novel about him, by Gabrielle Zevin. I was prevailed upon to change the title. This part of the book, though, is the crux of the novel for me, and it is as much about me as anything in the book is about me. To publish books across many years, as I have, is to have absolute proof of all the times I've failed, all the times I've been wrong. (Or, if not wrong, just all the ways I don't feel the same as the twenty-five year old who wrote that first novel.) My tenth novel, TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, will be published in July 2022. Like A.J. FIKRY, it's about storytelling, the lies we tell about ourselves, the difficulty of expressing love, the heartbreaking brevity of human lives, the struggle to connect, and video games. The title of the book derives from Macbeth's act five soliloquy, which is one of the bleakest soliloquies in all of Shakespeare. Strangely, the character who invokes it in my novel fines great hope in it--the idea that every day we are alive is a chance to start again--and also a metaphor for video games: “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.” In a way, this is a cousin to A.J.'s idea of "collected works." One last thing I'd want you to know about the new book -- video games are really just another form of storytelling, and if you understand that, it's quite easy to make the connection between A.J. Fikry and the characters of TOMORROW. You can find TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58784475-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow Thanks for reading these notes! It has been fun to go through A.J. Fikry again after all of these years. Enough time has passed so the book almost feels like it was written by a stranger! P.S. I actually wrote many more notes, but I had to cut them down. Apparently, ten to twenty is the optimal number of notes!