Rumaan Alam’s Shelf Life
Rumaan Alam is the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother and Leave the World Behind, which was an international bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orwell Prize, and adapted for a major motion picture in 2023 starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali - executive producers included Barack and Michelle Obama. Alam’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Bookforum and New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.
How and where are you?
I am in my office, a big sunny room that is kind of tidily untidy. I not long ago pledged to deaccession half of my library. I think I’ve managed that but still I’m out of shelf space, so there are piles of books all over the floor. There are stacks of paper, and also boxes of paper, like the manuscripts of my books and the drawings my children did when they were toddlers. There is a fraying Oriental rug, and a not-that-comfortable chair. There are a couple of healthy plants and a couple of dying plants, there are cups of pencils and an old cup of coffee and a huge stack of unopened mail and I find all this clutter strangely reassuring, which I suppose answers how I am. Work has its frustrations, the days have their disappointments, but generally, I’m happy when I’m in this room.
What are you reading right now?
At night, I’m reading Doris Lessing’s A Man and Two Women. During the day, I’m staring into the abyss of my phone, reading emails or torturing myself by reading about the election.
And, of course, watching or listening to?
I’m not watching anything because I never know what to watch. Nights we have some urge to turn on the set, my husband and I spend forty-five minutes trying and failing to decide what to commit to. I keep a list of films I’d like to watch but it rarely helps—it’s all long and serious things that I find I’m never quite in the mood for. A big part of the challenge is that I can rarely stay awake past eleven, so thoroughly have I become a morning person in middle age. My listening habits are even less exciting. I latch onto an artist or a record and I listen to it again and again for months at a stretch. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Blood Orange, Angel Olsen, and Cate Le Bon.
What did you read as a child?
I was a deranged reader as a kid, in a way that I think only possible when you’re a kid—if I didn’t have something else at hand, I’d finish a book and turn right back to the first page and start it again. I borrowed books from the library, and I’m grateful to the librarian who pointed me to the grown-up books that I was probably too young for, mostly mysteries by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you?
It’s hard for me to speak authoritatively about what has influenced me—I think influence is more subtle, or subconscious, or happens without us quite realizing it. I’m even more annoying about inspiration, I’m sorry to say, insofar as I never quite know what exactly it means. A list of writers I’ve read and loved would be almost impossible to compile but here’s who comes to mind, though: Willa Cather, Lorrie Moore, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, Patrick Modiano, Don DeLillo, Marie NDaiye, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Anita Brookner, Shirley Hazzard, Vladimir Nabokov, J.M. Coetzee, John Updike—I could go on and on, truly.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
My children once told me that the risotto I had made was terrible. Perhaps they were right, but still, it stung.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
I’m afraid it’s wholly opaque to me. I wish I could exert more control over it. My process, such as it is, is starts and stops, attempts and then surrender.
Tell us about your experience of the publishing industry.
Despite the obvious intersection between the two, business of publishing is wholly apart from the business of being a writer. My experience has been lucky, and quite happy, but I’m not sure what lesson there might be in that.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Be nice.
What are you working on right now?
I’m writing a short story, which is not very good, and I’m just beginning a novel, which I hope might someday be good, but who can say.
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam is out 17th September (Bloomsbury Publishing, Hardback, £16.99)
Rumaan will be appearing at the Manchester Literature Festival, 10th October 2024