Writing The Future

The billboard-sized screen ads Netflix used to promote the 2023 movie Leave the World Behind were impossible to miss last fall. That's partly due to the cast: The film-an adaptation of the widely lauded novel by Rumaan Alam '99-stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Myha'la Herrold. Leave the World Behind was an immediate hit, and it currently ranks in the top 10 of Netflix's most popular English-language films of all time.

Alam's novel, a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, also demanded full attention. Leave the World Behind follows two families navigating challenging dynamics of race and class as an unfamiliar and unnamed global disaster threatens their ways of living. The book is rife with fear and paranoia about the catastrophe that begins to consume the characters' lives. Sound familiar? Leave the World Behind was published in October 2020, when ongoing racial tensions and anxiety prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the country's conversation. The book read like a dystopian account of what could happen to us if we mishandled the challenges of the present day.

Much has happened in the nearly four years since Alam published Leave the World Behind. These days, he spends his time in his writing studio and office, located inside a quintessential Brooklyn row home. Natural light floods the space, illuminating the walls of built-in bookshelves holding hundreds of books. Alam says he read 114 novels in 2023 and is working his way through the canon of great American fiction, a journey that's led him to many unexpected favorites, including Don DeLillo's Underworld. There's a beautiful silk panel propped against a wall, a record player accompanied by boxes of records, and curated tchotchkes from the Leave the World Behind movie junket. Alam also has multiple copies of the manuscript of his forthcoming novel, Entitlement (out September 17 via Riverhead), piled next to his desk. The room is one of tasteful abundance; no space is wasted, and everything has its place.

"What a thing to do for your job, to sit at your desk in this comfortable, beautiful place," Alam says. He and his husband, photographer David Land, began renting this space two years ago after living and writing on top of each other and their two sons throughout the pandemic. Alam is chatting during the stretch of winter when he's eating so much citrus, "it's like I'm afraid of getting scurvy," he says playfully. Spring will come soon, but for now, he offers up strong, steaming black coffee that provides needed warmth.

[Link]Alam's forthcoming novel, 'Entitlement,' is out September 17 via Riverhead.

Alam navigates conversation with the kind of ease possessed by Oberlin students and professors; our comfort reminds me of being back in my Asia House apartment talking to an old friend about a particularly impactful play, opera, or concert we had just witnessed on campus. He moves between jokes, intimate observations, and universal assertions, speaking with familiarity and expertise about everything from the state of our collective cultural consciousness to his thoughts on Jonathan Glazer's films Birth and The Zone of Interest to his enduring reliance on his cell phone. "It's really hard to imagine leaving your phone at home and having the day you need to have," he shares. "It's really seductive. It's as well-designed as an Oreo cookie."

As we move beyond our initial subjects of inquiry, the dialogue resembles the profoundly earth-shattering conversations I had inside and particularly outside of the classroom at Oberlin: at co-op meals, amongst peers at student protests, on long walks through the arb, in the pews of Fairchild Chapel, after last call at the Feve. In conversation and in writing, Alam draws you in and makes you feel at home.

Right after earning a degree in creative writing, Alam started cultivating his home-and artistic tastes-in New York, moving to Brooklyn for an opportunity at Condé Nast. In the subsequent two decades, he rose through the ranks of literary New York by working in media and continuing to write fiction. In fact, Alam had published two acclaimed novels, 2016's Rich and Pretty and 2018's That Kind of Mother, when he landed a seemingly dream job in 2018-editor of special projects at The New York Times Book Review.

Alam ended up being in the job only briefly, but his decision to leave secure employment at the Times turned out to be the right one, as it led him directly to Leave the World Behind. He had been tinkering with a story idea before shelving it to accept the job at the Times. Upon quitting, Alam turned back to his idea. That evolved into his first draft of Leave the World Behind, which he subsequently sold in a seven-way auction before the pandemic. Similarly, the book's film adaptation rights sparked a bidding war before landing at Netflix in July 2020, ahead of the book's fall publication. A former U.S. president's cosign can't hurt either: Barack and Michelle Obama co-executive produced the film through their production company Higher Ground Productions. (Alam was also co-executive producer.)