Rumaan Alam wrote his first novel between the hours of 7pm and 2am every night. In the mornings, after getting his two boys up for school, he’d grab a nap, spend the day freelancing, fetch the boys and then, reminding his husband, David, not to talk to him after 7pm, he’d write for the entire evening and into the night. Three months later he had a book, then another and then, using the same brutal schedule, a third: Leave the World Behind, which changed everything. “It’s so common for people to talk about children as the death of the creative impulse,” says Alam. “But I really don’t think it is. It’s a spur.”
The 47-year-old is sitting in the cafe of the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan contemplating the weirdness of the last few years of his life. For Alam, there is some guilt attached to the timing of his good fortune; Leave the World Behind, a prescient novel about an apocalyptic event that maroons a bunch of affluent New Yorkers in the Hamptons, came out just as the pandemic hit. It was a huge instant bestseller, catching the moment but also transcending it, and was shortly followed by a movie adaptation for Netflix starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali. “It was such a terrible year for almost everybody, and it happened to be one of the best years of my career,” says Alam. “What could I do except be thrilled?” Plus, he points out, smiling, there was the extra, pandemic-era frisson of being happy, simply, that “we weren’t dead and could still have a livelihood”. Continue reading...
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