72 newyork| september14–27, 2020
understoodliterature to be. At Oberlin,
wherehestudiedcreative writing, he began
workona novelabout a rich white woman
studyingat a midwestern liberal-arts col-
lege.In 1997, afterhissophomore year, The
NewYorkerpublisheda special fiction issue
dedicatedtoIndianwriters. “This had a
hugeeffectonme,” Alam says. The effect
wasn’t,assomemightimagine, a widening
ofpossibility, a blueprint for how he might
approachhisowncareer. “It underscored
thewayinwhichanEstablishment that
judgeswhat fictionis will always append
thatmodifier,”hesays:Indianfiction.Asa
child of high-achieving immigrants grow-
ing up in Reagan’s America, Alam did not
want to be niche. “I wanted to succeed at a
game I didn’t devise but whose rules I was
able to read and internalize.”
Not until he’d graduated from Oberlin,
moved to New York City, and begun work-
ing at Condé Nast did he become fully
aware of his race and how it marked him as
different from his white peers. He started
there in 2000 as an assistant to the editor of
the now-defunct Lucky magazine and con-
tinued to work for the company on and off,
floating from role to role, for the next eight
years. “There was this delusion,” Alam said,
that persisted through his young adulthood
“that shattered in my actual adulthood.” He
recalls one upsetting experience inhis mid-
20s, when his boss invited him to a birthday
party at her townhouse in Carroll Gardens.
As he nursed a cocktail, he indulged in an
intoxicating thought, one any young profes-
sional in New York might find familiar: “I’m
a young nobody, but I’m here in this beauti-
ful mansion and I work at this magazine
and I feel like I belong here,” Alam recalls.
The fantasy was punctured when he ran
into his boss’s mother, whom he’d met many
times. In that moment, however, she mis-
took him for her driver. “I felt like I belonged
there, but of course I didn’t,” he says, “and
I just needed to be reminded of that to see
it completely differently.”
we’re sitting at a wrought-iron table in
the backyard garden of his house
in Prospect–Lefferts Gardens, the vodka-
and-ice easing the weight of the sun
bearing down on us. Charming and self-
deprecating, Alam leans back beneath the
shade of the umbrella, his chambray shirt
unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves rolled up
to reveal the dark outline of a Bengal-tiger
tattoo. His novelist friends describe him as
the platonic ideal of the literary man-about-
town, the sort of person you’d wantto linger
with in the corner at a party, listening to his
witty observations about the other guests.
When I mention this to him, helaughs.
“I am such a deeply underconfidentperson,”
he says, “but I am an excellent performer.”
On the way to the yard, he whisked me
through his home, which has been featured
regularly on design websites, past a stylish
blur of saturated colors and overlapping
patterns lined with eclectic art: a portrait of
Martin Luther King Jr. found on eBay, a
pitcher with a silhouette by Kara Walker.
Alam has lived here with his husband, the
photographer David Land, and their two
adopted sons for about a decade. Land is
white, and their boys are Black, and some-
times when Alam speaks about his family,
heseemstobeaddressinganimaginary
white suburbanite, the sort who might look
at his family and think it strange. “It’s a con-
ventional family in many ways,”he says.
“We live in a suburban part of New York
and have a minivan. It’s not as much of a
stretch as it may seem to some people.”
After more than 15 years of trying to fin-
ish his first novel, at 37, Alam finally knocked
off a first draft in three months. “I never
published a novel before I had a child,” he
said. “My kids don’t give a fuck about what
I do, and it’s important to me to have some-one in my life who does not give a fuck about
what I do.” He’d already spent years working
in magazines and advertising and women’s
fashion, feeling unsatisfied with his career.
That book, Rich and Pretty, followed the arc
of a friendship between two womenliving in
New York who were likewise vaguely dissat-
isfied with their jobs. Julie Barer, the agent
he submitted the manuscript to, found it
clever and absorbing, especially forthe way
it shined a light on the domestic moments
of women’s lives. “It was so spot-on,” she told
him, “I would have paid money that it was
writtenbya woman.”
That Kind of Mother—the story of an
affluent white poet, Rebecca, who adopts a
Black child—hews even closer to Alam’s life.
While his first book touches on race
obliquely, his second uses the conventions of
a domestic novel to explore the protagonist’s
racial blind spots and self-absorption. The
book was well received, but someseemed
bewildered by Alam’s identity. “Are you actu-
ally a woman?” joked an interviewer at
Vogue. The Black critic RebeccaCarroll,
who was raised by adoptive whiteparents,
asked in the Los Angeles Times, “What doesit tell us that a gay brown adoptive father of
two black children chose to tell the story of
interracial adoption by centering it on the
experience of a white woman?” She
described Rebecca as the “embodiment of
white privilege, which would be less grating
if she had any real sense of this throughout
the novel.” Yet that was Alam’s point: a
defining feature of whiteness is the lack of
awareness that accompanies it.
That Kind of Mother was the first novel of
a two-book deal. With a contract in hand,
Alam decided to attempt something differ-
ent.Hehadachievedplenty ofcritical
acclaim, but he hadn’t yet made the best-
seller list. “I went into this book with a ‘fuck
it’ spirit,” he said. “I thought, This is my last
chance—I haven’t hit a home run yet.” For
the first time, he would try to write about an
Indian immigrant. In December 2017, he
holed up in an apartment on the Upper
West Side that the crime writer Laura
Lippman had lent to him. But as he ground
away, turning out more than a hundred
pages of a draft, he had trouble focusing. It
was bitterly cold in the city, and he found
himself daydreaming about a vacation his
family had taken to the Hamptons—an
early seed of inspiration for Leave the World
Behind. He doesn’t know why he couldn’t
finish the draft he’d set out to write. Maybe
it was his old reluctance to write a character
that looked like him; maybe the other proj-
ect just seemed sexier.
The Times offered him the editorial job
two months later, and he set his fiction writ-
ing on the back burner as he attempted,
once again, to fold himself into life at a
media institution. Finally, at 40, he felt
more secure than he ever had in his career.
“I remember this moment of utter euphoria,
where I felt like I was going to do right by
my children,” he recalls. That feeling did not
last long. Alam didn’t want to go into the
details of why the job didn’t work out, but
he said it took him back to how he’d felt
when he was 25 at his old boss’s house: “The
realization that I think I’m one thing but the
world doesn’t see me that way.” Alam’s
friend the author Lynn Steger Strong was
disturbed he hadn’t made it at the Times.
“He’s so good at playing the game,” she says.
For a brief period after he decided to quit,
she remembers him being in a sort of dazed
free fall. But then he began showing up to
their coffee dates with pages. “We went
from talking about the frustrations of
bureaucracy to talking about the logic of
novels,” she says. Alam had come to the con-
clusion that he was “no longer suited to
institutional life” and dedicated himself to
finishing a draft of Leave the World Behind.
A comedy of manners wrapped inside a
tense disaster plot, it was easy to see in cin-“I am such a deeply
underconfident
person, but
I am an excellent
performer.”The CULTURE PAGES