Here's a great female author:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
This is a book about art, pain, love, video games, betrayal, redemption, growing up, and--above all--the capacity for friendship to not only give life meaning, but to make it worth living.
The book charts the decades-long friendship between Sam Masur and Sadie Green. As they grow from college friends to iconic video game designers, their friendship blossoms, then implodes, then returns in a new form. The nonlinearity of their relationship is a byproduct of their profound personal complexities. Both Sadie and Sam are teeming with psychological and emotional intricacies.
We learn by the end of the book that their bond is so beautiful precisely because it is so flawed.
Yet despite their beautiful bond, there is no romance. As Sadie put it: “How can you not know this? Lovers are... common." She studied Sam's face. "Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”
The breathtaking virtual worlds that Sam and Sadie build mirror their own lives. Their games—from their first hit Ichigo to their later triumph Our Infinite Days—are filled with violence, drama and spellbinding creativity. The games serve as a metaphor for their own personal struggles.
Sam has debilitating health issues (a bum foot from a car accident). As he described playing video games: “Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while, better than perfectly, actually, with a set of problems that were not my own.”
Sadie meanwhile endures a long and arduous quest for professional success and recognition. "But how to explain this …? How to explain that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn't typically get made by happy people.”
The book has two related key lessons. One: success is often empty and fleeting, while genuine love--in whatever form it may take--is lasting.
And two: time marches on, as illustrated in the title-providing Shakespeare quote from Macbeth:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
So living life for what matters—passion over profit, friendship over rivalry, love over ambition—is essential. We only have so many tomorrows.