If you visit Gabrielle Zevin’s author website, you will encounter a kind of opacity that is downright refreshing. Instead of links to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn and so on, Zevin makes an unusual statement. “I’m allergic to being online, but you’ll find me on Instagram sometimes, and only for the three months before and after I finish a book,” she writes under the “Contact Us” tab. “After that time, I will completely disappear from the internet and continue writing books.”
What a revolutionary concept! Zevin’s opinions, musings, Wordle scores, and snack choices are not available on Twitter. She has an author page on Facebook, but hasn’t updated her status (are we still blessing this?) since March 2021. She did post a time-lapse of hands frantically completing a jigsaw puzzle on Instagram, but — spoiler alert — the finished product turned out to be the cover of her fifth novel, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” which is now in its second week. is on the hardcover fiction list. Our reviewer, Tom Bissell, described the book as a “delightful and captivating” story “about brilliant young game designers making it big and slowly growing apart.”
“It’s not like I’ve written a book that’s negative about technology,” Zevin said in a phone interview. “Both my parents worked in computers. My father is a computer programmer.”
So why the reluctance to expose everything on social media? “I’m not someone who writes particularly well if I also put a lot of effort into an audience-oriented persona,” she explained. “I also find that the less I know about a writer when I read their book, the more I can give myself to that book. And I think privacy gives you creative freedom.” Zevin pointed out that putting together an online persona really isn’t that different from adding an Instagram filter to your photo, and that’s not something she’d like to do. She said: “We’re just babies when it comes to the internet and social media. We’re toddlers at best. I don’t think we’ve all figured out how to manage it and use it in the ways that will lead to the best results for society and for people as individuals. But that doesn’t mean we don’t.”
Like nearly every author ever interviewed for this column, Zevin said she values real, face-to-face interactions with readers. She also welcomes what used to be known as plain old mail and is now known as “snail mail.” (Fortunately, she didn’t use this term, which is almost as horrid as “gifted” as a verb.) Zevin deleted her email from her website — she felt she wasn’t responding to messages quickly enough — and invested in a post office box. , where she now receives correspondence. “It’s in a UPS store,” she said. “So I check if I need to send something, at least twice a month.”
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of ‘A Window Opens’.
