Maya Binyam Loses the Illusion

"It started to not make sense to me that I hadn’t drowned."

Mar 19, 2025

Friends,

If you grow up in Southern California along the beach you learn early about what’s called a rip tide, a pattern of currents that sucks from the shoreline directly out to sea. Rip tides are dangerous because you can be swimming close the water’s edge, in a perfectly safe place, even be able to touch ground, and then, before you know what’s happening, you’re way way out in the middle of the ocean and the current sweeping you out is so strong that no matter how hard you try, you can’t swim back to shore.

I got caught in a rip tide once when I was maybe 10, and what strikes me most about that memory was how fast it all happened— I was with two friends, and we were way out of our depth before we even understood what was happening. First the shortest one of us couldn’t touch the bottom, then the next shortest, and finally I, the tallest, was treading water too. We floated together for a few minutes, perplexed, laughing a little at this game the ocean was playing. We all waved over our heads at the two mom who was sitting on the beach, but she just waved back.

What I remember is that we were getting farther and farther away from the sand, that the mother on the beach was shrinking smaller, but that the water seemed so calm. The waves weren’t even breaking— they just surged, and we floated up the front of each wave and slid down its back, entertaining ourselves. We weren’t scared yet when an adult man appeared behind us on a surf board and said, in a stern tone we later giggled at, You are in A RIP TIDE. A lifeguard was one minute behind him. They towed us back to shore, explaining the whole way that the pattern of waves that swell but don’t break are a sign of a rip tide. The big surges we found curious and even fun to bob over were actually the lethal current pulling us out so far and fast we’d never be able to swim back.

I’ve been thinking about that experience lately— of thinking you’re having one kind of experience when in fact you’re having another, of being disoriented to realize that someone else knows more about what’s going on with you than you do— since talking to the novelist Maya Binyam. Maya is the recipient of the 2025 Bard Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and she is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. Her debut novel, Hangman, which was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, enacts turbulent disorientation so beautifully— in it, a man returns home to sub-saharan Africa after twenty six years of America, and when he returns he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. A man who claims to be his brother sets him on this odyssey to find out the truth about who he is, how he is, and what is real. At more than one moment in the book, this protagonist has the dizzying realization that nothing about his situation is what he thought it was.

The other reason I’ve been thinking about rip tides is because of the story that Maya came on Thresholds to tell— the story of a dream vacation that turned into a terrifying experience when Maya nearly drowned.

"The room that we were staying in which initially had seemed so fantastic --I remember taking pictures of the room when we got there, I couldn't believe how amazing it was-- and then sleeping in that room in the nights that followed, it felt horrifying. When I was in the bed, there was an illusion that the ocean was all around you. The sound of the waves that had initially seemed so calming were suddenly the soundtrack to an ongoing nightmare.

Coincidences surrounding the near-drowning started to mount — she knew other people who had drowned on the exact same beach, this place was significant to her family — and she began to wonder, as she told the story of this near-miss to herself and the people she knew, whether the story was supposed to have turned out another way.

I think a lot of us live under the illusion that death is very far away— if we’re lucky enough — and I found that that was stripped away in the days and months afterward. I became obsessed with retroactively narrativizing my own story. It started to not make sense to me that I hadn’t drowned. I started looking for signs of doom in my life leading up to that moment.

This is one of the most gripping interviews we’ve had the pleasure of running on Thresholds, and one that makes fascinating connections between between an artist’s life and their practice — we talked about the way the dizzy relationship to reality, narrative, and causality she found herself in after her near-death experience insinuated itself into the craft of Hangman, whose narrator is similarly unmoored. I think you’ll enjoy it.

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