Often I felt like, when I had time in the evenings or on the weekends, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and write more.

I don't have an MFA, so when I finished college and moved to New York, I was working in magazine publishing. Rumaan Alam: This is something I’ve done historically. Can you tell me more about that, and how this story arose through it? Author Benjamin Nugent Talks About 'Fraternity'Įsquire: I’m told that this story came about through an unusual writing exercise.Regina Porter Is Writing a Pandemic Novel.Karen Russell Talks About 'Sleep Donation'.On the day after Election Day, with the fate of the nation still hanging in the balance, Alam spoke with Esquire about tricking himself into writing, teaching undergraduates, and demystifying the creative process. Alam is also the author of the novels That Kind of Mother and Rich and Pretty. This year, Alam was a National Book Award finalist for Leave the World Behind, one of Esquire’s Best Books of 2020, which will become a Netflix adaptation starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. Languid and lonely, “Have One On Me” starts small, but unspools and accumulates to a bittersweet crescendo. Alam’s story locates an itinerant critic in middle age, who reflects on love and loss while sliding anonymously through airports, hotels, and restaurants. “A coincidence,” Rumaan Alam writes, “even about coincidence itself, is interesting only to the person implicated, as dreams are of interest only to dreamer.” In “Have One On Me,” his new story published exclusively at Esquire, Alam interrogates the role of coincidence in our lives-how sly and strange such resonances are, but also how very ordinary.

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