Shifting Gears with Maya Binyam

A catalog of hot reads by hot writers.

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When Maya Binyam arrives at the Red Lion Tavern in Silverlake, I no longer worry whether my full leopard print outfit is “too much.” She is wearing black platform boots, thigh-high socks, and a lace bow in her perpetually windswept curls. She looks phenomenal. Binyam has what people call “siren eyes”––an alluring, mysterious gaze that makes you rack your brain for something clever and charming to say. The server already knows her drink order––a gin martini––and brings over a free basket of fries. “I don’t know why he’s so nice to me,” Binyam wonders once he walks away.

Her first novel, Hangman, was released in August of last year. It’s the type of novel you should know very little about when you start reading––it adds to the pleasure of discovery. I will tell you this: The book follows a man returning to his home country in Sub-Saharan Africa to seek out his dying brother. I wasn’t the only one who found it remarkable––Hangman was long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, as well as being named a “Best Book of the Year” by The New Yorker, Vulture, and BBC. Plus, Binyam herself was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree––making it onto one of those coveted “blank under blank” lists.

Despite receiving all this praise as a debut novelist, none of it has gone to her head. The approval and recognition of others doesn’t affect her sense of self, nor her relationship with her writing. She’s too modest to lean into the spotlight, so she ends up asking me just as many questions as I ask her. Soon, the interview dissolves into a conversation about IUDs, D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, age gap relationships, the Gerber baby, Biblical names, Boston’s Ethiopian community, Albert Camus, and the importance of taking thirst trap photos with your car. She’s the kind of person you can lose track of time talking to––and, happily, I do.

CORA LEE: You were an East Coast girl for most of your life. What prompted the move to LA?

MAYA BINYAM: I never have a good answer for this question. Truly, I would come here on vacation and feel really euphoric in a way I couldn’t describe. It was honestly because I was smoking so much weed when I would come on vacation, so I always felt good. And I bought a convertible in New York, so I thought: I have to move to a warmer climate.

CL: Okay, I’ve been wanting to ask about the convertible.

MB: I bought it in January 2021. For some reason I got into my head that I needed a roadster. Probably because it represented everything I wasn’t having in my life at that time. I wrote a piece that paid me pretty well that fall–$2 a word. And it was a long piece. I thought, “I’m just gonna fucking buy a car.” I found it on Craigslist for a really good price. It was the Z3 from 1997 with only 45k miles on it. I don’t know if you care about this!

CL: I actually do care about this! I drive a 98 Ranger.

MB: Wait...do you drive stick too? Do you really identify with it?

CL: Oh god, yes. I make it my whole personality.

MB: I catch myself in moments being really annoying about the fact that I drive stick. I’ll find myself subtly bringing it up.

CL: It’s impossible not to!

[At this point we show each other photos of our vehicles and squeal in delight.]

CL: Okay, I do ACTUALLY want to talk about Hangman. First off, you know how people talk about unreliable narrators? In this case, I felt like it was an unreliable setting. The result was a very dreamlike quality.

MB: When I was writing it it didn’t feel dreamlike at all. It didn’t feel ambiguous. Obviously there was some ambiguity built in because I wasn’t naming any of the locations and there’s a lack of proper nouns. I was surprised when people started reading it and they felt like there was a dreamlike quality to the text. I was surprised, but not unhappy about it. It’s a very different experience to write something than to read something.

CL: I wouldn’t say it’s dreamlike as in “ethereal.” It’s more like what a dream actually feels like: Things are disorienting and something is off, but you don’t question it. Did you know how it was going to end when you started it?

MB: When I started it, I knew the narrator was going to a funeral. I wasn’t sure whose funeral it was. When I was halfway through I figured it out, and it seemed obvious. But up until that point, it could have been one of three different people.

CL: Hangman has been described as a “brilliant illusion” [The Guardian] and a “tragicomic masterpiece” [Politico]. What is your favorite piece of praise that your novel has gotten so far?

MB: I’m trying to not say something deflective, but I have total amnesia around it. It’s not that people haven’t said really wonderfully nice things––It just doesn’t affect my relationship with my work that much. If I was only hearing negative things, maybe it would be tarnished. But my relationship with the work is very personal. When others have positive experiences with it, that’s great, but it doesn’t boost my sense of self. Whatever people say has nothing to do with sitting down at the computer and trying to write something else.

CL: I think that’s great–you don’t write with the innate awareness of how it’s going to be received.

MB: Do people write like that?

CL: Do people write thinking about their audience? I think they do. Couldn’t be you!

MB: Could not be me! It’s me and this computer, and that’s it.

CL: Regardless, your career so far has been illustrious. You’ve had pieces published in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and beyond. Is there anything left on your checklist that you want to accomplish?

MB: No. I’d love to have health insurance, honestly. Beyond that, I just want to be able to write. I would like to cover my expenses, save a little money, and write more books. Ideally my health insurance would not be attached to a job, but that’s our government.

CL: That’s how they keep us from striking. Who do you consider some of your literary influences?

MB: Such a hard question to answer. When I was drafting Hangman I was reading My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid. I’ve found her prose to be very influential. Tayeb Salih also has a way of writing about communities that I find really compelling. Season of Migration to the North, The Wedding of Zein…There are these kinds of characters that emerge and don’t seem to have significance to the forward momentum of the plot but they animate it. I’ve always been compelled by the side stories that appear in novels.

CL: In an interview with Powell’s Books you say you are a superstitious person. What do you consider a good omen or a bad omen?

MB: Okay I don't have concrete rules. But last year I was at a residency in Washington and it was really dark. I’m not usually someone to read the energy in a room, but this island was really dark. It was really beautiful, but there was something about it that was sinister. It was an American and English colonial camp, and those histories were being celebrated all over the island. The more time I spent there the worse I felt. I was there on October 7th when the genocide started in Gaza. It was a very strange place to be while time was breaking and people were experiencing immense grief. I would run in loops and look out at the ocean. I was on a run and I saw a premature baby otter that had been ejected from its mother’s womb. It still had the umbilical cord attached. And I thought: This is a really, really bad omen.

CL: Do you think it’s a byproduct of being a writer to see symbolism in things?

MB: I usually resist symbolism, but seeing dead animals never feels like a good sign.

CL: Do you feel that writers have a responsibility to use their voice to comment on the state of the world?

MB: I generally have a difficult time understanding the word “voice,” at least when it’s used as an abstractive metonym for more tangible elements of life. Using your voice, giving voice to others––it can start to feel like a dead word, like a prop: something is always being done to it. I believe that everyone, regardless of their profession, has an obligation to name the conditions of the world, and to strive to name them clearly, even and especially when they benefit from a political and social system that makes suffering seem unreal and somehow, simultaneously, inevitable. Writers, I guess, have a special obligation to do so in language, and professional writers have an obligation to investigate the institutions that profit off their labor for complicity in the suffering they name, or should be naming, in their writing.