Rumaan Alam, LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rumaan. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about Leave the World Behind. I'm delighted to finally be talking to you.

Rumaan Alam: It's my great pleasure. I only wish that we were doing this in person because I can see into your home library, and it's absolutely beautiful. I would love to get in there and poke around on those shelves personally.

Zibby: You have an open invitation as soon as people are allowed to socialize again. I don't know when that will be. I miss having people here. I miss it. I loved having authors streaming in and out. You're welcome anytime.

Rumaan: Someday I'm going to take you up on that.

Zibby: Please do. As I mentioned, we were supposed to do this interview a while ago, but now you've had all sorts of great news that has come since the launch of the book, including today. It won't be when this airs, but today you found out you're now shortlisted for the National Book Award, which is really exciting. Congratulations.

Rumaan: Thank you.

Zibby: And also a Barnes & Noble pick and a Read with Jenna pick. What next for this book? [laughs]

Rumaan: The thing about writing a book, and I'm sure you've heard this from your guests in the past, is that it's just this very sustained leap of faith. You have absolutely no idea what will happen when the book exists. I'm also aware of the fact, as you know very well, there are so many great books every year that never really connect with the right readership. Sometimes it takes time for a book to find its way into the hands of the right readers. When that happens quickly, you know what a blessing it is. I know every step of the way, what a particularly thrill it is because the book isn't alive in any meaningful way until someone reads it. It just isn't. Those awards are wonderful. Being part of a television book club is wonderful, but the reason it's wonderful is in service of getting the book into the hands of the people who will bring it to life. That's what's exciting about it. The idea that more readers will come to it is a thrill, really a thrill.

Zibby: If you were to win an award and no one found out about it, let's say there's this secret Pulitzer Prize but you can't announce it, you wouldn't be excited?

Rumaan: I'd be excited because, of course, it's a statement about how those judges felt about the book. That's really just a statement about how those particular readers felt about the work.

Zibby: I'm just playing with you. It's fine.

Rumaan: Of course, it's gratifying to the ego. Every artist is possessed of an ego. Writing is just an act of ego, really. Of course, it's thrilling, but you have to think about what really is important in those moments. What thrills me, honestly, the most is when I see on Twitter or on Instagram -- I've seen this a bunch, and it's so lovely -- when readers get the book from the library, when the hold is released and they get the digital edition from the library. That's really thrilling to me. Look, the name of this podcast is moms don't have to time read. We live in a culture that doesn't make a lot of space for an experience of art. When people pay for your work, not in terms of their money but in terms of their attention, that's sacred, almost. It's really moving to me that people would spend the limited time that we all have, the hour before bedtime, with my work. It's really meaningful. I really love that.

Zibby: That's such a nice way to look at it. That's great. I love that. Will you please tell listeners who might not know what this is about a little about the plot and how you came up with the idea for it?

Rumaan: Leave the World Behind is a novel about a middle-class white family who live in Brooklyn. They're a professional couple. Amanda works in advertising. Her husband, Clay, works as a professor. They have two teenagers, Archie and Rose. The family, when we meet them, is heading out to Long Island for a holiday. They're not going to a super chic part of Long Island where you can go buy an expensive painting or have a thousand-dollar bottle of wine. They're going to a more quiet, understated part of Long Island. These parts do exist because, in fact, this is based very much on a place that my family and I went on vacation, beautiful, bucolic, rural farmland not far from the ocean, not far from the millionaires in East Hampton, but its own little quiet part of Long Island.

Zibby: Where is it? Can you say where it is?

Rumaan: Oh, it's my secret to keep. I will tell you later. The family goes on vacation. They have the experience that you want on vacation. They go and buy a bunch of fancy groceries. They make hamburgers. They lounge by the pool. They go to the beach. They stop at Starbucks on the way home from the beach. That's my dream vacation stuff. That's what I love to do. The second night they're in the house, there is a knock at the door. It’s late at night. They're in the middle of nowhere. No knows that they're there. It's not their primary residence. There's no reason someone should be knocking on the door. It's an older black couple named George and Ruth who tell Amanda and Clay that this is their house. They're the owners. They rented to them on Airbnb. They’ve come there because there's an emergency happening in New York City. From then, the book shifts from being a book about holiday and family to being a book about what you do in a moment of crisis. I feel like that's a good way of talking about what the book is without -- I don't really care about spoilers, but I'm mindful that some readers want to experience the shifts in this book for the first time themselves.

Zibby: We'll just leave it at that. Was the book inspired by your vacation?

Rumaan: Very much so. In 2017, we had had this beautiful vacation. At the end of that year, it was December and I was staying as a guest of the wonderful writer Laura Lipman at her home in New York City. It's on the Upper West Side. It was December. It was very cold. It was not far from the Hudson. When I left the apartment to run out and get a cup of coffee or something, it was just freezing cold, freezing cold. You know how in New York, you can have those patches of ice on the sidewalk? It never rained and it never snowed, so you don't actually know where this ice came from, but it's that kind of weather.

Zibby: I think they call it black ice.

Rumaan: It's just looming ice. You're like, what I want most right now is that feeling of summer vacation. I was remembering my own vacation. That particular moment, that stay, had really lodged in my head. I want to write a novel about vacation, but I wanted to push through it, push through the particulars of a family in a vacation home, which is a convention of books. There are many great books. I love that convention, but I wanted to find in that material, something with bigger implications, something that told us about not just family life, but cultural life, civic life, political life, the moment that we're all in right now. That was the attempt of the book.

Zibby: Looks like you hit the nail on the head.

Rumaan: I'll let readers decide, but thank you.

Zibby: Popular culture is saying you got it. Nice job. When you get an idea for a book, what comes next? Do you outline? Do you just sit and write it? Do you do any research? What's your process like?

Rumaan: That's a good question. Usually, what I do is I write into it for fifty pages, seventy pages or so. Then I make an outline. In those first fifty to seventy pages, what I'm looking for, really, is the sound of the book. To me, the sound of the book establishes everything, how I'm going to write about the people, what the people are going to be like. Somehow, the name of the person really defines how I write about them. It's just about nailing whatever the voice is. Once I've nailed the voice, I can sit down and say, what am I doing here? What is this story going to look like? I outline. Usually, what I try to do is confine an outline to a single piece of paper because it feels very doable. I can tape that piece of paper up onto the wall of my office. I can copy that piece of paper down in my notebook. I can carry it around with me. I can have this one little cheat sheet that says to me, this is what you're doing. This is the book. It is in twelve sections or four sections or whatever the structure is. When I say outline, I don't even mean the kind of outline that we made when we were in third grade and we were learning how to write a paper about the Declaration of Independence where it's the main idea and all this stuff.

Zibby: There are no Roman numerals?

Rumaan: No, no Roman numerals. Usually, what I do is I just put one, two, three, four, five. Here's the main idea of this section. Here are maybe how the characters will work. The outline is revised in tandem with the book. It's not a roadmap for a vacation destination. The math is changing as you're in progress. I adjust the outline. I change things around. I feel my way forward with some guide, but also a little bit by instinct.

Zibby: Interesting. Then once you do the writing, how long did it take for you to write this book?

Rumaan: I wrote this book very quickly. I wrote a draft of this book in about three weeks.

Zibby: Three weeks?

Rumaan: It fell out of me. Yes, I wrote a draft of the book very quickly, in about three weeks' time, but that doesn't reflect the amount of labor I had put in prior thinking about the book. I keep a notebook with me. I write sentences down. I write scenarios down. I write character names down. I write down ideas for scenes. I had a secret Twitter account where I was tweeting lines from the book. I tweet a lot, and I realized at some point that it's just a form of writing. I'm wasting that energy. I could channel that more productively if I tricked myself almost the way that you might trick yourself by getting off the subway two stops early, and then you're getting in your steps for the day. It almost feels like that, taking Twitter, a technology I use all the time, and forcing myself to engage in my fiction that way.

Zibby: What would you tweet?

Rumaan: What became the first chapter of this book was originally drafted as tweets.

Zibby: One line at a time?

Rumaan: Yeah, one sentence at a time, one thought at a time. I think that really helped me stay inside of the world of this book until I sat down and wrote it. I sat down and wrote it. The draft came out very quickly. It's very important for everyone to understand that that draft is very bad, very, very bad. It's the same relationship between a bowl of pancake batter and a finished pancake. The application of heat makes a pancake, and the application of time makes the book. It's revision, revision, revision, breaking it apart, breaking it into sections, looking at each section, seeing how each fits together, rewriting. Over time, you lost your sense of what material from that first draft exits in the final draft. It's really hard to say. For me, the work doesn't begin until I have those first three hundred pages. There's nothing to do. You're just talking theoretically. If you force yourself, as I usually do, to sit down and write, write, write almost like a marathon, don't look back. Don't correct. In a first draft -- the character's name is Amanda -- I could break that and call her Amy on some pages. It doesn't matter. I don't stop myself. I know I'm making mistakes. Revision is for addressing those mistakes. That period takes a very long time. It took a year, but that's what it's for. Good work takes time.

Zibby: Wow. I like that process. The secret Twitter account, did you ever unveil that it was you?

Rumaan: No, no, no, it's locked. No one can follow it. I'm the only one. I don't think my own account follows that account. It's totally locked. It's just an interface that I could switch my -- when you're inside Twitter, you can switch your identity to that other account, and then you can see all these sentences. It was just a fun way of staying engaged in exactly the same way that -- I'm sure you've seen this on the subway. You'll see somebody, an artist, sketching. If you don't have any artistic ability, that looks like an amazing thing to you. I think that what they're doing is just warming their hand. They're just indulging their eye. They're just sitting there. They have the time. They're commuting uptown or whatever. They’ll say, I'll just capitalize on this forty minutes that I have of sitting-down time to move my hand and use my eye. I think that that is so much of what being an artist is, is about keeping that muscle toned.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about your background and growing up and how you ended up here, how we got here, essentially. Where did you grow up? When did you fall in love with writing? Assuming you did.

Rumaan: That's an easy question to answer because I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer, probably five. I was writing at that age. I think a lot of kids are inclined toward artistic expression, drawing. Kids can get really passionate about drawing. Both my boys have gone through periods where they're really passionate about making graphic novels. They're just reflecting what they take in as art. It's also because there's an impulse inside of you to communicate that way. Some people never grow out of that. I think I never grew of that. That was something I wanted to do deeply, and I knew that for a long time. I studied writing when I was an undergraduate. I studied at Oberlin College. I worked with a writer named Dan Chaon who's an extraordinary writer who blurbed this book, which is such a great honor for me. Then I moved to New York to work in magazines. As happens to so many people who have a particular feeling about art, reality intrudes. You've got to pay your rent. You have to join the labor force. You have to find a way forward. That can be difficult to do and also stay connected to the work that you care about. I tried to do it. I did do it. I worked in magazines. I had a lovely career in publishing. I also still wrote. I still exercised that muscle. In 2009, we had our first son. In 2012, we had our second son.

At some point in that period when my boys were little, little, little, I had a playdate with the writer Emma Straub who's also a novelist. She was my neighbor at the time. Emma and I went to college together. She said something that is so simple but so clarifying. Knowing my aspirations to write, knowing that I had been a writer all along in private, she said to me, "No one is ever going to ask you to write a book." That’s absolutely true. No one is. No one is ever going to ask you, unless you're Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama will be asked, but no one would ever ask me. The lesson being if there's something you want to do, you need to do it. I really do credit my children with this because having children, as I think it does for many people, clarified my own priorities. A lot of stuff falls away when you have kids because you just can't do it all. You realize that you care about your family life. You may realize you care more about your career than you had thought, and you want to commit yourself to that. You may realize that you care less about your career than you thought, and you want to be at home with your family while your children are young. This is what children can provide for so many people, mostly for women, to be honest, because this is not always the way that fathers have to reckon with this big question of, what is it you most want? In my household, there are two fathers, so it's a different dynamic.

What I learned in that moment when Emma said that to me was that I really wanted to try this. I didn't want to be fifty-one and not have given it a shot, not that fifty-one is so old. It's perfect valid to rebegin your career or your artistic life at that point, but I knew I wanted to do it. It was burning within me. My younger son came home in 2012. By 2014, I was working at New York magazine. I had an amazing job where I was editing the design issues, which was such great fun. Built into that job was a hiatus of, I think it was twelve weeks. It might have been fourteen. I had these fourteen weeks where I wasn't going to be working in an office. I wasn't going to be making any money, but I was going to be kind of free. My younger son was a baby. My older son was in school. He was in his Montessori school, his little preschool. Everything was kind of settled. I said to my husband, "I'm going to try something. I'm going to take these fourteen weeks, and I'm going to try something. You can't ask me any questions about it. You can't talk to me about what I'm doing. Every night at seven o'clock, if you're home --" He travels a lot for work -- "if you're home, you'll put the kids to bed. I'm going to sit down in the living room," which is where my desk was at the time, "and I'm going to work. In the morning, you're going to get up with the kids and let me sleep a little bit. I'm going to be focused on this."

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh, your saint of a husband.

Rumaan: I know. I know.

Zibby: I would be like, I don't like this plan at all. Absolutely not.

Rumaan: This is another big lesson from my career. For many people it is a spouse who provides this particular kind of stability, but it doesn't have to be. A lot of artists require an anchor in reality, somebody who cares as much about their work as they do. My husband provides that for me. He said, to his great credit, "Yes. You do what it is you need to try to do." For those fourteen weeks, Zibby, the boys went to bed at seven. I sat down at the desk from seven until one or two in the morning. I slept from two until six when everyone wakes up, of course. I would have breakfast with the kids. I would pack their lunch. I would take the little one to the daycare. I would come home. It would be eight thirty. I would have slept four hours. I would go back to bed. I would sleep until noon or eleven. I would get up. I would do the laundry, do the dishes, make sure dinner was ready, make sure everything was ready for seven PM so that when the kids went to bed I was back at my desk. The latest I think I ever stayed up was, I stayed up until four one morning, so I slept for two hours. I was younger then.

Also, I think you can kind of survive anything when you have a baby because the baby has so broken your relationship to time that it almost doesn't matter. When you have a small baby, you can be like, it's 1:50 and I have to be out of the house at two thirty, three. I'm going to sleep for eleven minutes. I'll feel better. I'll be fine. You do it because you don't have much of a choice. They showed me that I could do more than maybe I thought. In that period, I didn't do anything. I didn't watch any television. I barely had dinner with my husband. I barely spoke to him. I was really committed to that work. That's the period in which I wrote the first draft of my first novel. Work demands sacrifice. It demands sacrifice. What I had to sacrifice was that sleep, but it changed my career. It changed everything about my life because I sold that book. I found an agent based on that book at the end of that year in December. The book sold the following spring. It appeared the following summer. Completely changed my life.

Zibby: I hope your husband got a dedication in that book. He didn't, did he? You didn't even do it.

Rumaan: I think I dedicated it to the kids. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, man, this poor guy. You need to go give him a hug after this conversation.

Rumaan: I can't stress how important it's been to my work. His faith in my commitment to it has been hugely important. This is demanding work. It's self-centered work. His acceptance of that and his belief in that and his confidence in my ability to do that have everything to do whatever success I've had. Very few artists, I think, feel confident at all times. You need to know that there's someone saying, no, no, no, you ought to be engaged in this. You're on the right path and it will pay off. I don't mean in terms of money. I just mean in terms of, you'll be happy. You'll have done the thing you want to do. When I said before about Emma challenging me or pointing out that no one would invite me to write a book, what I was thinking about was not, I want to have money or I want to have a career. It was that, I want to have done this. I cared about this. It was the thing I cared about since I was five.

I want to have been honest with myself and worked for that, and so I did. I'm really glad that I did. It makes it so much easier for me to be comfortable with the challenges of a life in which you're not always -- no matter what you do for a living, you care about it deeply, whatever, but there are other things to be done. Other reality intrudes. Family life intrudes. My responsibility as a parent is so much easier for me to bear because I know that I'm satisfied professionally and personally and artistically. I've catered to the monster inside of me. I've indulged myself, and so I can do the acts of parenting which have, as you know, nothing to do with the self, nothing. You're just a conduit. You're just a hand putting food into a mouth. That's what you are. That's the relationship. That's what you've committed to. That can be very difficult for people. That's a difficult relationship. It's also sacred and very meaningful. It's what I care about most.

Zibby: I feel like you just summarized what it means to be a mother, essentially, honestly, or a father. That's what the whole thing is. I would say a tiny percentage of, let me just say primary caregivers get that kind of filling of their bucket, so to speak, that enables them to then go back and do it. I've noticed the same way. I used to only work a little bit. Now I do this. I'm doing all these other things. Then I go out my door and I'm like, all right, pillow fight! [laughs]

Rumaan: I think it's true. It allows you to still be a person. It's a personal choice also. There are parents for whom that role is so fulfilling and it's all that they need. They can be really inside of that. It's not that I don't find it -- I find it deeply fulfilling. Words can't even really hold it, how fulfilling I find it. I think part of the reason I'm able to find fulfillment and joy in it is that I have this other thing. It's become important to me as a part of the practice of parenthood, because children are ego monsters, that they see firsthand the ways in which people have other things that they care about and that they can hold in their head the contradiction that you are the person who takes care of me and is always there for me, but sometimes you will not be there for me. Your not being there for me because you are a doctor working late, because you're a bus driver on your route, whatever it is, you are also doing as an act of care for me because you earn money and you take care of me. They can understand that over time. I think that's really a useful way to understand your place in the world. That's what I tell myself anyway. Who knows? No parent knows what they're doing, really.

Zibby: No, nobody knows what they're doing. I certainly didn't mean to say that I am not fulfilled by my children either.

Rumaan: Right. I know you are.

Zibby: I love being with my children. It is my greatest pride and joy. So are you working on anything new now? What are you up to?

Rumaan: When I described being at Laura Lippman's apartment in Manhattan, I was actually writing a different book. I've been trying to go back to that book. Leave the World Behind emerged and took over my life and my imagination. It was something that felt really urgent that I wanted to write. I'm glad that I did. I want to go back to this other book. At the moment, I'm teaching, actually. I'm teaching at Columbia and at Pace. I am, as so many parents are, kind of orchestrating my children's education as well in this particular period. I write as a freelance writer and critic. I'm encaged in a lot of stuff. To be honest, I don't feel wholly committed to the work of the fiction right now. In some ways, I think that that's natural. When I'm charged with talking about my third book, it's going to be difficult for me to be engaged in thinking about my fourth book in the same way that very few people are eager to run out and get pregnant again when they have a four-month-old at home because you're in that moment. You need a little time and a little space. I don't know, but I do intend to write another book. I hope that I get that clarity soon. I think when the semester ends and it's winter, and hopefully we'll have a new government in this country, I might feel a little less quotidian stress and be able to relax into a fiction again. That's my hope.

Zibby: Then in the meantime, this is going to be a movie or a limited series? What's the latest?

Rumaan: Yes, it's going to be a feature film that the writer and director Sam Esmail is writing. He's adapting the novel. He'll direct the film for Netflix. Sam is such a brilliant filmmaker, if you don't know his work. He made a show called Homecoming, I think it was for Amazon, with Julia Roberts. He made a show called Mr. Robot. Sam has a very particular sensibility that really, really suits this material. He understands how to find unease in what looks like elegant calm. Homecoming is such an extraordinary show. Julia Roberts, who is the star of Homecoming, will star in this adaptation of Leave the World Behind, which is insane. Every time I say it, saying it does not make it sound real. Denzel Washington will also star in the film. It's in such good hands. It's part of a larger charmed run I've had with this particular book to find collaborators like that who you can put the material into their hands. What a win.

Zibby: That's amazing. I'm so excited to see it. That's going to be great. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Rumaan: I think that you have to actually do the labor. It's so hard to. One of the things that I always stress when I'm teaching is that there's more time than you might think there is.

Zibby: Especially if you stay up until four in the morning.

Rumaan: Look, not everyone is wired to do something that deranged. I totally understand that. The significant factor in that is not just my husband's help, but that was huge. It's that I wasn't working for that period of time. I could never have done that and had to go to a day job. Most people have to. That's a real luxury. When I say that there's always time, what I usually mean is that there are ways of tricking yourself, much as I tricked myself using Twitter. That's a great example. When I teach, I always say when I'm feeling really stuck and really desperate, I set myself a very arbitrary and accomplishable goal, usually with some sense of play, like, you have to write 333 words. You can't write more than that, but you cannot write less than that. It has to land at 333. You don't have to write the thing that you are thinking about writing. You can write anything, but it has to last that long. Or turn on an episode of Friends, turn off the sound, and sit there and write until that episode is over. The truth is that even on a really busy day, you would probably allow yourself the particular indulgence of sitting still and watching a sitcom for twenty-two minutes and saying, I'll do the laundry the second this is over. Let that TV run with a notebook on your lap or with the laptop on your lap, and write that whole time. Then when the show's over, turn it off. Go deal with the laundry. Get the dog walked. Take out the checkbook and deal with your bills, whatever it is that your life involves.

Twenty-two minutes is not a lot, but it's a step forward. It's just like going to gym. We've all had that experience when it's January and you're like, god damn, I've done nothing but eat since Thanksgiving. I've really got to go to the gym. You reactivate your gym membership. Then you're like, I can't go today because I have to take the kids to soccer. I can't go next week because, actually, they have this dentist appointment that I forgot about that I made eleven months ago. Why did I make it now? You find all these ways to tell yourself you can't do it. Then one day your resolve breaks. You're like, well, fuck, I guess I have to go to the gym. You go to the gym. You're like, I'll just go for thirty-eight minutes. I'll ease into it. You go, and what happens? You feel amazing. You're like, I went. I did it. I didn't go for an hour. I went for thirty-eight minutes, but you know what? I did it. Now I know I can do it. I'm going to do it next Tuesday too because I know the kids are in soccer. I can drop them and go and run for thirty-eight minutes and come back and pick them up. Everything is fine. The world will continue on. Making space for writing in your life, if that is something you prioritize, can function the same way. If you go to the gym for thirty-eight minutes a week, it might take you six months to feel like, yeah, I feel strong, I feel better, I feel good, but you will get there. If you write for twenty-two minutes a week and you're producing three hundred words, yeah, it's only three hundred words, but six months later -- I can't do math. I just realized I backed myself into a corner.

Zibby: I get the point. [laughs]

Rumaan: You're at like seven thousand words. That's not that much, but six months later, you're at fourteen thousand words. Then you're like, wow, I have one fifth of a book here. I did it. I put one foot in front of the other and did it. That's exactly the same way that everyone who does this does it. Every writer you admire who you think, oh, my god, I could never do what Jane Smiley does, I could never do what Louise Erdrich does, I could never do what Margaret Atwood does, yeah, they're all geniuses, there's no question, but Jane Smiley has to sit down, take out her pencil, and be like, all right, it's time. I got to show up and do it. Anyone can do that. As Emma said to me all those years ago, very few people will invite you to do that. If that's what you want to do, you have to find a way to do it.

Zibby: Wow. That was a pretty tempting pseudo-invitation. I feel like that was very inspiring.

Rumaan: Get to work. What can you do? It's just work. It is just work. If there's one thing we understand in this country, because we have such a warped relationship with work, it's that we can do more. You can squeeze time out. To be honest, I don't have much of a life beyond this, to be perfectly clear. At this moment, no one's doing any of these things, but I very rarely go to the movies. I very rarely go out to dinner. I very rarely have a night where I'm just out with friends doing nothing. I spend a lot of time here at this very desk where I'm talking to you, but it's a choice that I've made. I've published three books in the span of six years. There's a direct relationship between my productivity and the other choices I've made. There's a lot of privilege in play there. There's a lot of luck in play there. Fundamentally, it is accomplishable. If you want to write, if you care about it as I do, I think you'll find a way. You just have to allow yourself to find a way.

Zibby: Awesome. I will be sitting here mostly at this desk. You will be over there. I'll think about you on the invisible Zoom once you're off and imagine you writing and not having any fun. No, I'm kidding. It was lovely to meet you.

Rumaan: Likewise.

Zibby: One day, you'll come here. We won't have to be apart from a screen. This book was amazing. I'm honored to have talked to you. Best of luck with all the great successes that you deserve. Go get a bottle of wine for your husband.

Rumaan: [laughs] Thank you so much, Zibby. It was really lovely. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.