Daniyal Mueenuddin on the Depths of Business Relationships

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Daniyal Mueenuddin about his new novel, This is Where the Serpent Lies.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Since you spent so much of your life in Pakistan, as you were writing this book, and really digging into the lives of these characters that represented so many different circumstances and classes, did it inform anything new for you?

Daniyal Mueenuddin: You know, the characters I write about in my book are sort of very similar to a lot of the people that I’ve been doing business with for now, for, you know, 40 years. When you’re dealing with somebody in a business setting it’s a very profound and deep relationship. There’s nothing that ties two people together more closely than passing money back and forth. So, you’re very close to your business partners, but you don’t think very much about their emotional lives. I guess. You don’t think about other aspects of their lives, other than the ones that are the part of them that’s concerned with making money and doing business. And so, in the course of writing the book, of course, I thought about these characters on a more global in a more global way. I thought about aspects of their personality that I hadn’t thought about when I was just simply doing business with them. So yeah, it certainly has made me think about my counterparts in business in a whole new way.

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Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan, and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For a number of years, he practiced law in New York. He now divides his time between Oslo, Norway, and his farm in Pakistan’s South Punjab.