Sarah Thankam Mathews on Her Brush with Mortality and the “Sourdough Starter of Ego Death”

This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the essay collection Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.

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Writer and organizer Sarah Thankam Mathews (All This Could Be Different) joins guest host Mira Jacob to discuss a brush with mortality in a rip-tide off the California coast, discovering “the sourdough starter of ego death,” and the problems of being an artist under capitalism.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

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Mentioned:

Big Sur, California • “How to Escape a Rip Current” • What It Is by Lynda Barry • I May Destroy You • Michaela Coel’s Emmy acceptance speech (video, transcript)

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From the conversation:

Sarah Thankam Mathews: I think it was really useful for me to be in this place of having cast aside some degree of ego. I genuinely feel like the person I was at the time I was entering the waves in Big Sur, at the time I was like, I’m going to write a big-dick immigration novel about a queer, Malayali American, Washington D.C. power broker. And I think that version of me had sort of died actually, and I had become not a completely different person, but someone who was meaningfully, differently motivated in the kinds of things I cared the most about and the ways in which I wanted to use my art making.

When I thought about the waves this time around, they came as visual and vivid memory again and again, but in a warmer, friendlier way. When I was writing—and particularly when I was writing in the most intense stretch of writing the book, where I was working on it every single day, just cranking it out as much as I could—I would remember the feeling of being in the waves, but the memory was less encoded as helplessness and fear and more the sense of: you’ve done difficult things before, you lived, you lived for a reason. At least tell yourself that. You’re going to write your book. You are going to get to the shoreline.

It was really uninvited meaning-making. I was not trying to think about any of that stuff, but it’s just what came to me. I’m a lot more woo-woo about writing than I was seven years ago. I think there are vaguely mystical things about it sometimes, and I think it’s okay to let that stuff border your work and your process.

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For more Thresholds, visit us at thisisthresholds.com. Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.

Sarah Thankam Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States in her late teens. Her work has been published in Best American Short Stories and she is a recipient of fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2020, she founded the mutual aid group Bed-Stuy Strong. All This Could Be Different, Mathews’ debut novel, was named an NYT Editor’s Choice, chosen for multiple high-profile Best of 2022 lists, and shortlisted for the National Book Award.