Running to the Noise, Episode 17

[00:00:00] Excerpt from Leave the World Behind official trailer: We were driving back to the city, then something happened. You want to stay here, but we're staying here. We need to get them out of here. They need to think everything's gonna be okay. Everything is gonna be okay. We are seeing ongoing cyber attacks across the country.

[00:00:30] Carmen: I'm Carmen Twilley Ambar, president of Oberlin College and Conservatory. Welcome to Running to the Noise, where I speak with all sorts of folks who are tackling our toughest problems and working to spark positive change around the world. Because here at Oberlin, we don’t shy away from the challenging situations that threaten to divide us. We run towards them.

[00:01:00] Carmen: In Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind, a white family rents a swanky Airbnb in the Hamptons on Long Island for vacation. When the Black couple who owns the house unexpectedly turns up, you might think you're in for a social satire about race—until the story morphs into an apocalyptic thriller.

[00:01:30] Carmen: An unknown global disaster is knocking out cell phones and causing strange phenomena like deer stampedes and flamingos gathering in swimming pools. Written before the COVID-19 lockdown, Leave the World Behind eerily anticipates our feelings of isolation, dread, and denial in the face of an invisible threat.

[00:02:00] Carmen: The 2023 Netflix adaptation—starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke—captures the novel’s unsettling atmosphere and currently ranks among the top ten most popular English-language films on the streaming service.

[00:02:30] Carmen: Alam’s newest novel, Entitlement, follows Brooke, a 33-year-old Black woman raised by a white mother in New York. After an unfulfilling stint as a teacher, she lands a dream job with an 83-year-old billionaire seeking to give away his fortune.

[00:03:00] Carmen: Released a few months before Trump’s inauguration—an event attended by some of the world’s richest men—Entitlement is a prescient exploration of the influence of the ultra-wealthy and their power to shape the way we live and behave.

[00:03:30] Carmen: Alam has a knack for predicting cultural shifts and capturing them with precision on the page. We’ll discuss this gift and more on this episode of Running to the Noise. So, Rumaan, welcome to Running to the Noise. Thank you so much for doing this podcast.

[00:04:00] Rumaan: Oberlin alumni cannot say no when Oberlin College comes calling, so it's a great pleasure.

[00:04:15] Carmen: You know what? I'm going to take that and put it on a loop before I call anybody. Or right before I call them, let me just say what mine says. I love that. So, I’ve been so excited to talk to you. I know that Oberlin is special to you. Maybe you can tell the audience a little bit about why this institution has been so important to you.

[00:04:45] Rumaan: There was a feeling for me at Oberlin that the sky was the limit because I was a kid with a plan. Oberlin, at the time—I started in 1995—was one of the few undergraduate institutions that had a creative writing major. I knew that I was going to major in creative writing, even though it was competitive. I felt very confident about my ability to do that. I remember the department describing the major as being for “writers of serious purpose.” The institution respected its members.

These were 17- and 18-year-old kids, but the school was saying, "Okay, you are writers of serious purpose." And in fact, they were. I was in rigorous workshops led by experienced writers, much older than me, who respected me and took my work seriously. That was always my plan going to Oberlin—this was my vision. I was going to do that. And I had a more responsible “Part B”—I was also going to major in English.

[00:06:30] Carmen: It's funny.

[00:06:35] Rumaan: It is funny. And I thought that would help me find a way forward—to work in publishing—which is, in fact, exactly what I did.

[00:06:50] Carmen: I’ll tell you a little side story. Some of the audience may know that I have 17-year-old triplets who are in the process of applying to college. My daughter came to an Oberlin event, and one of the things she got to do was sit with creative writing faculty at the end of the day. She has some aspirations there as well. And when she left that event, she said, "One of the things that really impresses me about Oberlin, Mom, is that people care about what students think here."

[00:07:30] Rumaan: I think that’s right. And I think a lot of what I was able to accomplish—and have been able to accomplish—since then is predicated on this idea that the school took me as seriously as I was taking myself. I could then hold myself to that standard, and it has served me well. I found a footing professionally right after school in ways that were deeply connected to Oberlin, in fact. Because it was Oberlin alumni who helped me begin my career.

[00:08:15] Carmen: So, maybe you could tell us that story about how you found that incredible job that I think every creative writer would want. Just tell the story of how you got into the role that was right after Oberlin.

[00:08:40] Rumaan: Throughout my time at Oberlin, I had a relationship with The Review, the world-class student newspaper.

[00:08:55] Carmen: Very much so.

[00:09:00] Rumaan: I wrote a lot about television with a colleague on pop culture. This caught the attention of one of my professors, Jeff Pence, in the English department. He said to me, "You seem very interested in this kind of magazine-style journalism. Then he said, A woman I went to Oberlin with—Kim France—is coming to speak about her career in magazine publishing. You should come to our house, we’ll have dinner, and you can talk to this woman."

It was a very kind invitation. And this is the kind of thing that happens at a school like Oberlin. Professors say, "Come over for dinner, I want you to meet this person."

[00:09:55] Carmen: That’s right. This is a great story, but not a unique story. Students here get to have dinner with their professors, a colleague or friend comes over, and all sorts of wonderful things happen from there.

[00:10:15] Rumaan: Life, in fact, really can change in those moments. I met Kim France, an Oberlin alum. She had made quite a career for herself—she was a writer for Spin Magazine, an editor at New York Magazine, and at the time, though I didn’t know this, she was working on the prototype for a new Condé Nast publication.

After I graduated, I sent Kim an email. She emailed me back and said, "Come visit me." So I went up to her office, she showed me what she was working on, and she spent 45 minutes with me. A real act of generosity.

[00:11:05] Carmen: Right, right.

[00:11:10] Rumaan: A couple of weeks later, I sent her another message just to say thank you so much, it was great to see you, it was such an education. And she emailed me back and said, "Talk to this woman at Condé Nast HR. You can come and be my assistant."

And that’s exactly what happened. I was there during the launch of Lucky Magazine. And that—well, that’s the fairy tale ending. But it’s less about the job offer—although understandably, seniors are focused on that—it’s more about the opening of a door. It’s about that moment when someone extends an opportunity and says, "Come in, you are welcome here."

[00:12:10] Carmen: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:15] Rumaan: It’s important to provide context—this was the late ‘90s, early 2000s, a very different time in American life. I had always had a sense of belonging—whether in my childhood or at Oberlin.

Oberlin is a place where everybody belongs.

[00:12:45] Carmen: The freakier, the better, right?

[00:12:50] Rumaan: Exactly—it’s a place of belonging.

[00:12:55] Carmen: Listen, as I always say, we’re a place that celebrates difference. That’s who we are.

[00:13:05] Rumaan: Unfortunately, that’s still rare. Not all institutions function this way. And Condé Nast is quite a different company now than it was 25 years ago.

At the time, it was a very rarefied place. It was a kind of finishing school for women—mostly women, not exclusively—but largely the daughters of vast wealth in New York City.

[00:13:45] Rumaan: I was briefly working at another magazine, and one of the interns was the granddaughter of a well-known American billionaire. And there she was, pushing clothing racks around the office. You just had this sense—it was the first time in her life she had ever had to hang anything on a hanger. She had never had that experience before.

It can be an awakening—a rude one, but maybe a necessary one—to go from a place like Oberlin…

[00:14:30] Carmen: Right.

[00:14:35] Rumaan: …where you are taught to value yourself, where your peers and colleagues show you that the institution cares about you—to then find yourself in a context where that may not necessarily be the case.

[00:14:55] Carmen: Yeah.

[00:15:00] Rumaan: I hardly need to explain this to a Black woman in America, right? You are prepared.

[00:15:10] Carmen: Rumaan, I don’t want to steal your thunder, but yes, I’m sure Condé Nast has changed a lot. But I do think that it’s not atypical for students of different backgrounds to have stories like this, even now.

[00:15:30] Rumaan: There are so many levels to this. You could be a first-generation college student whose parents don’t understand white-collar work. There are all these ways you can find yourself as the fish out of water.

What happened to me was this small moment of friction—I arrived at the security gate, and they thought I was a messenger.

[00:16:05] Carmen: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:10] Rumaan: Right. And that’s something that has famously happened to Hilton Als, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic at The New Yorker.

So this wasn’t the world against me—it was the world as it is. And realizing that I didn’t entirely belong to the world I aspired to…that did something to me. It sharpened my ambition.

[00:16:50] Carmen: Right.

[00:16:55] Rumaan: And I allowed myself to be healthy about it. You are never going to be a straight, white guy. You can’t aspire to that. You can’t aspire to be treated as though you are—because that is the recipe for your own ruin.

You have to be amused by it, look at it straight, and know precisely what it is. To know that your difference may mean you do not live up to someone else’s standard—but that someone else’s standard is incorrect.

[00:17:50] Carmen: I love how you said you handled it in a healthy way. Because I think that’s a challenge for people who are seeing their difference through someone else’s lens in real time.

How do you handle that in a healthy way? You said it also fueled some ambition in you too, right? So, I’m not going to be a victim about it, even though I may be frustrated by what happened.

[00:18:30] Carmen: It’s going to fuel something in me.

[00:18:35] Rumaan: It’s just the way it is. I’m raising two Black sons, as you are. My older son is 15. To me, he still looks like a baby, but he’s stopped looking like a baby to the rest of the world.

It was freezing cold in New York this winter. He was running out the door to the store for me, and he put on his balaclava—a mask that covers his face. Just big eyes sticking out.

And I said, "Oh, baby, you can’t wear that to the store."

[00:19:30] Carmen: No—the audience can’t see me shaking my head, but the whole time you’ve been talking, I’ve been going, "No, no, no, we can’t do this."

[00:19:45] Rumaan: Yes. And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Because people will think you are a criminal." It’s freezing outside, and you look very cute in that hat, but you cannot wear that to the store. I’m sorry.

[00:20:15] Carmen: Yes.

[00:20:20] Rumaan: Because it is better for him to know that, understand it, and not agonize over it. He would be right to agonize over it, because it is unjust. But it is simpler and healthier to simply say it as it is. He then gets to decide how he will deal with this.

[00:20:40] Carmen: Right. No, I—this so resonates with me because those of us who are raising children of color, and in this instance, Black boys—Black girls too, but Black boys—we all talk about the talk that we have with them around what it means to navigate through a society that sometimes views you from a particular lens. And I did this thing with my children as they were getting ready to drive. I asked a local police officer to come to my house and actually walk them through a traffic stop and actually handcuff them and actually do that process. And I’m sure some people listening to this would be like, “Why would you make them go through that type of thing?” And it’s because I’m trying to prepare them for the world as it is.

[00:21:20] Rumaan: I think that’s right. I think you can control your responses to that. And what I’m describing isn’t oppression. It’s unjust, yeah. I’m a rich, healthy, expensively educated person, so I can’t really claim oppression. But I can acknowledge to myself that I had an experience that was disenchanting—to feel that I had a career that I really wanted in magazine publishing and to realize that there were limits to what I was going to be able to accomplish. And that was okay because that’s not the most important thing in the world to me. What was more important was making a living, having a family, and pursuing my art.

[00:22:00] Carmen: Was that sort of the impetus and the kind of ambition that led you to not be in the comfort of a salaried position that comes with maybe Condé Nast in that world, and instead to strike it out on your own with novels? To enter this world where you really have to pursue this with passion and dedication, and hope that things work out in all these wonderful ways that they have for you? Was that the thing that made you do that?

[00:22:30] Rumaan: It’s a bit of lunacy, isn’t it, on my part? It hadn’t occurred to me, but to connect the dots back to my experience at Oberlin College—when you were an upperclassman in the creative writing program, the bulk of your credit is not really derived from a classroom experience. You’re having a kind of one-on-one standing meeting with a professor, producing pages. The last three semesters at Oberlin, I was in fact a part-time student because I had enough credit. So I was going to school part-time and I was working in the town of Oberlin. And I had a real feeling of independence—that I was stitching together the life that I wanted. I was writing and meeting with Dan Chaon, who was my faculty advisor at the time, and I was working at a restaurant and as a nanny in town. I had made the life that I wanted in this sort of beautiful microcosm of Oberlin, Ohio.

And I sort of brought the same attention to my life in New York City, where I pieced together that same feeling of independence—of a little bit of work here, a little bit of work there. We had a kid. I was able to put it all together and make it work. This was unusual then. It’s more common now, as the economy has shifted toward gig work and away from institutional employment.

[00:24:00] Carmen: Yes, that’s right. And you have to remind the context that you’re doing this in—a world where, here at Oberlin, so many of our students are in the arts and music. It’s kind of understood that you’re going to be stitching it together, right? We provide them with kind of business courses and other things to help them stitch it together. But you’re right, that wasn’t necessarily how you saw things in ’99 and the early 2000s.

[00:24:30] Rumaan: After this foray into magazine publishing, I was able to return to the core ambition, which had been the same when I was applying to college, when I was a child, when I was in elementary school. I always wanted to be the person who wrote books. That was always the ambition. The idea of working in publishing was a way of pursuing that responsibly—of saying, "I have a job, I have health insurance, I have some structure to my adulthood." But I wanted this life as an artist.

[00:25:00] Carmen: It’s such a wonderful lesson for our students about how you find your way to this thing that you’ve always wanted to do. You’ve had such success, really incredible success. Tell me, what’s on your writing desk right now?

[00:25:20] Rumaan: I keep my desk very simple. I have a pencil, a big notebook that is specific to the book that I’m writing, a pencil sharpener, and a banana. That’s my reward for the end of the day. Unfortunately, if you’re working on a computer, you have every distraction available to you. You have all of human knowledge right here in this stupid metal box that you’re staring into. I try really hard not to play around. I put on some music and I do my job. My goal is always to write five pages a day when I’m writing a novel, because it seems very modest but it accrues over time. You’re talking about 25 pages a week. You’re talking about 100 pages a month. After three months of this, you probably have the draft of a novel. That’s right—a bad draft, a messy draft. But so much art is about that discipline, to show up and simply do it, and do it. Some days it goes really well, and some days you’re agonizing, and it’s 6 p.m. and I’m only on page three, and I’m like, "How did I waste all this time?" But you return to it again, and understand it, or I understand it, as a practice.

[00:26:40] Carmen: One of the interesting things about Stephen King is that he argues that if you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have time to write. One of the things that you said in our alumni magazine in 2023 was that you read 114 novels that year, which—as a mom of triplets, and I know you have two kids—I thought to myself, "What the heck? Is he just trying to make us all look bad?" What is going on here? But maybe you could just tell us, how do you choose the titles? How are you choosing the books you read, and what does being a voracious reader mean to you?

[00:27:10] Rumaan: It is simply who I am. That sort of deep connection to literature, that feeling that you’re never going to run out, you’re never going to get anywhere close to being what I would call well-read—it’s actually impossible. There’s always some writer you’ve never heard of, there’s a writer in translation who you’ve never encountered, there’s a great American classic you haven’t read. I’ve never read Moby Dick. That’s still out there waiting for me.

[00:27:40] Carmen: You can skip the whaling chapters.

[00:27:50] Rumaan: But to me, I think there are readers who find that daunting. I find it liberating because it takes the pressure off. You don’t have to have read everything, and you don’t have to have read everything by a certain age.

[00:28:00] Rumaan: And books don’t go bad the way that yogurt does. You can come to them when you come to them. I’ve fallen in love with a writer before and wanted to read their entire body of work. That’s such a great way to educate yourself—choose an author and then read the seven books they’ve written.

[00:28:20] Carmen: Absolutely.

[00:28:30] Rumaan: All respect to Stephen King, but I would point out that I have personally found it very enriching to engage with other forms of work as well. To watch a film, to go see a painting, to experience live performance. It’s impossible to predict how that will enrich or sharpen what you’re trying to do on the page.

[00:28:50] Carmen: So you're willing to take other forms of artistic endeavors as inspirations and opportunities to think about things that you might not have imagined?

[00:29:00] Rumaan: Absolutely. And if nothing else, even if it doesn’t lead to something in my work, it’s part of the point of being alive. You should go listen to Stravinsky on a Wednesday evening because it’s there. It’s there for you. It’s a gift for you, and you should take that gift. I have only found that to enrich my practice of being a writer. If one understands the relationship to art like that—as casual, as constant, as a part of your life rather than something set aside or special—then I think it only enriches you as a human being.

[00:29:40] Carmen: That’s such a powerful testament to how art influences the way we perceive the world. So, what are you reading right now?

[00:29:50] Rumaan: Right now, I am reading Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, which is a story of a great German composer who has accomplished, reached the pinnacle of artistic expression via a deal with the devil. Thomas Mann is one of my favorite writers. The Magic Mountain is an extraordinary novel. It’s one of those books that’s just waiting for you. It’s a big, long book, and understandably, contemporary readers might think, "Oh, I don’t know if I can read this big, long book about this guy in a sanatorium in the mountains, spending seven years doing nothing." But if you’re in the right place and you come to that book at the right time, it can be wholly absorbing.

I really relish that experience of wrestling with a book over a period of a couple of weeks, even months. Americans can be too focused on productivity and consumption—always moving forward to the next thing. I think it’s okay to have this relationship with a book where you read five pages of it three nights a week and then think, "Wow, I’m really sitting with this interesting, weird German novel." There’s no right or wrong way to read a book.

[00:31:00] Carmen: I’m so glad you said that because I do think that sometimes the reason why we shy away from books like that is because we treat reading almost like a job, like something that has to be done. And our inability to get through the first chapter in the first two nights makes us say, "Oh my God, I just can’t do this anymore."

It reminds me of an experience I had when someone taught me how to go to a museum. I used to go into museums and spend all day there, just exhausting myself, not really seeing things the way I wanted to, because I was trying to get through it. And someone said to me, "The way to go to a museum is to remind yourself first that you’ll be back." Decide that you’re going to spend two hours, see a few of your favorite pieces, go through the special exhibit, and eat at the café. It completely changed the way I experience museums—it took so much pressure off.

And what you just said is another light way to think about reading a novel. I don’t have to put so much pressure on myself.

[00:32:10] Rumaan: Right. You’re not an undergraduate anymore. If you’re an undergraduate, you have two weeks to read that book. You better read it.

[00:32:20] Carmen: That’s right.

[00:32:30] Rumaan: You’ve got to write the paper, you’ve got to deal with that. But when you’re just reading for yourself, you should enjoy that liberty.

[00:32:40] Carmen: I didn’t want to finish our conversation without getting into Leave the World Behind. Strangers are stuck in a house together, and the world is undergoing this kind of mysterious, unidentified disaster. We learn about these people inside the house, and one of the things I think is so fascinating about when you wrote this book is that it was right before the pandemic.

Both this book and Entitlement feel like a kind of crystal ball—you’ve captured something in the world before it fully emerged. When people read Entitlement, they’ll see that it explores the ultra-wealthy, power, and influence. It almost feels like you’re predicting the moment we’re living in now. So let me ask—do you feel like you have a crystal ball?

[00:33:30] Rumaan: What I think is really happening is that that’s what people turn to art for. That is art’s function. It’s not necessarily predictive, but we want art to help us understand what’s happening.

Everyone has a different experience of that, or different insights depending on what it is. You could listen to Bach and feel that it helps you understand what’s happening right now. Or, during the first Trump administration, a book that felt particularly salient was 1984—a book that was written half a century earlier.

There’s no way to predict which work will feel especially resonant or relevant to an audience at a given time. And I don’t think artists aspire to prescience, necessarily. But I do think they aspire to seeing a project through to the end and creating something that may provide that for an audience, whatever that thing is—something that exercises the mind.

[00:34:30] Carmen: Let’s talk a little bit about the character Asher in Entitlement, this 83-year-old white billionaire. How did you build that character? And if you’re willing to reveal it, were there any real-world figures that inspired him?

[00:34:50] Rumaan: It would have been too easy to write a novel where the billionaire is just the bad guy.

[00:35:00] Carmen: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:10] Rumaan: Asher, to me, and hopefully to readers, is a complicated guy. Really, he’s pretty genial. He’s kind of sweet. He didn’t make his fortune selling missile defense systems or pharmaceuticals—he made his fortune selling office supplies. And he’s used that fortune to buy art. And now he wants to give it away.

Who could be against office supplies, right? Who could be against that? Everything about him is kind of defensible. He’s a little racist, but he’s 83. He’s a little sexist, but he’s 83. He’s not some Harvey Weinstein-level predator. Even if his interest in his protégée feels like it has a little edge of something untoward, he is, to me—and I hope to readers—the more real for that.

It’s not interesting to me to write a novel that just says, "To have billions is bad on the face of it." That’s too easy, I think. I think it’s more interesting to explore what happens when a genial, respectable, decent person—someone whose politics I even share—ends up representing some of the worst things about society.

[00:36:20] Carmen: And I guess I just wanted to ask about Brooke. She becomes obsessed with Asher and the lifestyle he represents. As she deepens her association with him, one could describe her as becoming warped—making choices that maybe her family and friends don’t understand. She puts on expensive shoes, using the foundation’s credit card. She’s not truthful about her salary when securing an apartment she can’t afford. She’s behaving in ways that her family would be frustrated by, and as time goes on, we don’t really recognize her. What lessons do you think we can learn from her journey?

[00:37:00] Rumaan: Well, leaving aside the question of her light criminality, which none of us should participate in—

[00:37:10] Carmen: Yes, agreed.

[00:37:20] Rumaan: The real question, I hope, that the book is asking readers is: "Are we any different?" Are we any more free of the influence of money? Of desire? Of the power of advertising? Of the power of a culture that is constantly telling us to want and to acquire? Are any of us free of that system? The last word of the book is "free". And I think, in the end, what the book offers Brooke is a form of deliverance. She is freed of something. But the real question is: Is the reader? Or even the writer?

[00:38:10] Carmen: Those questions that force us to ask, "Are we any different?"—those are powerful, challenging moments as you read a book. A lot of the topics you explore—race, class, power, and how they divide us—feel risky in today’s climate. Do you think about the risk you take in your work?

[00:38:40] Rumaan: You know, what’s funny is that I don’t really think about it that way, even though I know that others might. And I suppose that’s probably because of Oberlin. Oberlin is not a place known for being risk-averse. It’s an institution that encourages, if not outright rewards, a willingness to push—artistically, intellectually, and even in terms of pure stamina. That expectation gets set early.

If you have an undergraduate experience where your professors—like mine—are saying, "Oh, what you’re writing is clearly a novel." Keep going, then you don’t internalize a sense of creative hesitation. You don’t hear, "Be careful writing about race—that’s sensitive." Or, "Be careful writing across gender—that’s complicated." No one ever said that to me. None of the people who guided my education discouraged me from exploring anything I found important.

[00:39:40] Carmen: Right. Even though you know your work might be received as risky, it’s not what drives you. You’re just pursuing the art as you see it.

[00:39:50] Rumaan: Exactly. And I also think that I have to allow for the possibility that I might get it wrong. And that’s okay. My novel Entitlement is written from the perspective of a Black woman. Well, I’m not a Black woman.

[00:40:10] Carmen: Although people have praised your ability to write in the voice of women in particular.

[00:40:20] Rumaan: I find that very gratifying. It makes me happy. It makes me feel like, "Okay, I accomplished the task I set for myself." But I also know I have to accept the judgment of a reader who feels that I didn’t accomplish that, and that’s also okay. I think that’s something you learn in your education—you can try, and sometimes you’ll succeed, sometimes you won’t. No one is going to succeed at 100%. This isn’t a third-grade spelling test. It doesn’t work that way.

[00:40:50] Carmen: And that’s okay.

[00:40:55] Rumaan: It is. And when it comes to writing voices outside of your own experience, it helps to have lived a life surrounded by people who are different from you. You have to see the fundamental humanity that is shared among all people, no matter what their demographic differences might be. If you’ve spent your whole life in the hothouse of your own identity, without understanding that other people feel exactly the same way you do, then you’re going to struggle to write outside of yourself.

[00:41:30] Carmen: Preach!

[00:41:35] Rumaan: Everybody looks at the sky and sees it the same way. Everybody wants to eat that one meal that their mother makes. Everybody wants to go home and take their shoes off at the end of the day. There are fundamental human experiences that are universal. If you are working in good faith, you can try anything. If you’re working in bad faith, well—good luck to you.

If I were writing a novel starring a Black woman to prosecute the case that I hate Black women, then of course that book would be doomed to failure. But that’s not what I’m doing. And I have to trust that the reader sees that I’m working in good faith and that I’ve done my best to get it mostly right.

[00:42:20] Carmen: That reminds me of something I often say about what we’re trying to accomplish at Oberlin. It’s why we do things like meet full need and bring a diverse set of voices to campus. Our tagline is, "Think one person can change the world? So do we." And I tell prospective students all the time: "If you’re going to go change the world for good, you better have met somebody with a different perspective than you do—so you can get it right." And I appreciate your willingness to immerse yourself in perspectives that are different from your own.

[00:43:00] Rumaan: That fundamental respect for difference—you have to possess it, and you have to be in places where that is a given.

[00:43:10] Carmen: So let’s talk about adaptation. When a work you’ve labored over is adapted into a movie, what is that process like for you? What felt uncomfortable? What felt exciting? And, let’s be honest—did it matter that the Obamas were producing it?

[00:43:40] Rumaan: Leave the World Behind was published in the fall of 2020, but the conversations I had with filmmakers started the summer before that. I had a phone call with Sam Esmail, the director who ultimately adapted the book. We were talking about movies we liked, and he asked me what films influenced the book.

I told him Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—that feeling that you, as the audience, are trapped at this demented cocktail party with these people. I mentioned Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, an incredibly unsettling movie in which an explosion of violence has no explanation—you simply cannot understand why these bad things are happening. Sam, being a filmmaker and a great film lover, was like, "I love that movie. I love this one."

What we didn’t talk about was, "I’m going to make this movie and here’s how." Instead, we had a conversation about art—about what mattered to us creatively. That made me feel a real sense of trust, and I’ve come to understand that this kind of trust is rare for novelists dealing with Hollywood.

[00:44:50] Rumaan: What I really appreciated was that Sam was always very clear—both to me and in public—that the book is mine, and the movie is his. They relate, but they exist independently. One doesn’t detract from the other. I think that’s the healthiest way to approach adaptation. And honestly, I think he made an amazing movie.

Then there were the surreal moments—like when we had a conference call and they said, Well, Julia Roberts is going to be in this movie. And I’m like, "Okay, sure. Then they said, Mahershala Ali is going to be in this movie." And I was like, "Wow. Okay." And then they said, "Oh, and the Obamas, through their production company, are going to be executive producers. Also, you’re going to Washington, D.C., to talk to the president."

I mean—what am I supposed to say to that? There’s no response besides, "Wow, this is amazing. This is good fortune." And, honestly, whatever fleeting moments of ego or self-doubt I might have had—none of that matters.

[00:46:10] Carmen: Right.

[00:46:15] Rumaan: It’s kind of like being nominated for the National Book Award. That’s an incredible thing. It meant a lot to me. But it’s fleeting in the larger context of life. And I’ll tell you what—you have teenagers, so I hardly need to explain this—teenagers don’t care if you’re nominated for the National Book Award.

[00:46:35] Carmen: Oh my God, no. They do not care.

[00:46:40] Rumaan: They don’t care. They don’t even know who Julia Roberts is, God bless them. They just don’t care about that stuff. And I think that’s useful. I care about it, because it’s my job to care about it. I’m proud of it. But what matters most is what actually matters most, and I know the difference.

You don’t write a book so that Julia Roberts will star in the movie adaptation. You write it because it’s the thing you had to write. It’s something you’ve been preparing for your entire life. It’s about the ideas you care about.

[00:47:15] Carmen: And that’s what makes it honest.

[00:47:20] Rumaan: Exactly. But it’s difficult. It’s difficult to start. I say this all the time when I teach writers—it’s difficult for everyone. I’ve talked to writers who have won the Nobel Prize, and they’ll tell you—"Page One is just as hard for them as it is for anyone else." And I actually find that reassuring.

Leave the World Behind—to me—was a book about the environment. Entitlement is a book about money.

[00:47:50] Carmen: Right.

[00:47:55] Rumaan: And my new book is about something that is deeply unfashionable in contemporary literature—God.

[00:48:05] Carmen: Oh, wow. Okay.

[00:48:10] Rumaan: But that’s what I care about. And you know, I’ve been fortunate—I’ve had a readership, I’ve achieved success by industry metrics—but I haven’t done it for those reasons. I’ve done it because these are ideas I need to put on the page and get out of my head.

[00:48:30] Carmen: I love that. That’s something I hear a lot from the artists I talk to. There’s something inside them that says, "You have to do this. You have to get it out." And recognizing that is a privilege—it’s special.

[00:48:50] Rumaan: It is. And that’s a great way of putting it—because it’s urgency, but it’s also love. There are a lot of artists out there for whom the urgency is the art, but the necessity is waiting tables or working a day job. That’s just how life works.

I’ve had a different experience, and that is a privilege. And, honestly, I feel a responsibility to work even harder because I succeeded.

Success, in this context, can mean a couple of different things. If I were talking to an auntie, she would say, "Well, you have enough money to feed your children and pay your mortgage. That’s success." And yeah—that’s one definition.

If I were talking to a different kind of person, they might say, "Oh, you have a commercial publisher and you’ve been nominated for awards—that’s success." And sure, those are great metrics of success.

But the only one that really matters to me is the one I employ myself—"Did I finish the book? Are there five good sentences in the whole thing that I stand by?" If the answer is yes, then I keep going forward.

[00:50:00] Carmen: And the fact that you’ve been able to define success in multiple ways is so powerful. I just want to thank you for the good work you’re putting out in the world. You’re giving us incredible things to read and think about, and we’re all proud of you. So, thank you so much.

[00:50:20] Rumaan: Thank you.

[00:50:25] Carmen: Thanks for listening to Running to the Noise, a podcast produced by Oberlin College and Conservatory. Our music is composed by Professor of Jazz Guitar Bobby Ferrazza and performed by the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble—a student group created through the support of the legendary jazz musician.

If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode so that Obies and others can find it too.

I’m Carmen Twillie Ambar, and I’ll be back soon with more great conversations from thought leaders on and off our campus.