Yearning as Motion: A Conversation with Marisa Crane https://ift.tt/jiVblUf
Marisa Crane’s new novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is a coming-of-age novel about an all-consuming relationship between two teammates on a high school basketball team. Crane is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself. Their new novel has been described as “fearless, ferocious, and blessed with the kind of vision that lets you see everything in real time,” and in it, Crane tackles grief, sexuality, drugs, and the push-and-pull between the past and the future.
Marisa Crane is a former college basketball player and the author of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Indie Next pick, and winner of a LAMBDA Literary Award. They have received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, American Short Fiction, and Vermont Studio Center, and their short work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Sun, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Joyland, and elsewhere. Originally from Allentown, PA, they currently live in San Diego with their family.
You write a lot about bodies in motion both in micro and macro ways — the characters in A Sharp and Endless Need are constantly in motion on the court, they are also on the cusp of leaving high school, leaving their hometown. Can you talk about writing motion?
I love this question! I love bodies in motion. I love the cliche quote about how basketball is poetry in motion, because it is, it really really is. (I actually have a piece coming out in Lit Hub comparing Chelsea Gray’s game to poetry!)
I’m reading this incredible book right now, Margery Kempe by Robert Glück and it’s all about devotion, desire, the erotic, and yearning. It’s got a million lines I need to take pictures of and send to everyone I know but one line I really dig is this: “The more I need you, the deeper the estrangement, the stronger my desire — a defect in the movement of love.”
It makes me think about yearning as motion, as running in place, digging in deeper, exhausting yourself into oblivion and yet finding a way to continue on — and love, reciprocal love, as real movement, the ongoing traveling to a place with and for each other. Mack is in perpetual motion but not really moving anywhere — how can they, when they are a stranger to themself and everyone else, maybe even Liv? How can they, when they don’t know unabashed love, when they are living a life compromised by alienation and hopelessness, a clinging to an identity contingent upon a shot clock and a stage to perform on?
To keep with the theme of bodies and motion, can you talk about writing sex? Writing sex scenes can be very difficult. What is your approach to writing sex?
Writing sex is, hands down, one of my favorite things to do. I love it so much. And I love to teach classes about it, too, including how to expand our idea of what a sex scene even is (like a game of 1-on-1 basketball can feel like and emulate a sex scene ).
In my opinion, there are two stages or situations in which we are most likely to reveal something about ourselves, something we often try to hide or push down, maybe something we are unaware of entirely, and that is during sports and during sex. And the two have such overlap — the sweat, the aggression, the bodies colliding, the chemistry, the transcendence, even the ass slapping. And they both can have a certain level of performance to them as well. As such, I think of the basketball scenes as sex scenes between Mack and Liv, I really do — possibly as even more resembling sex scenes than their actual sex. (Spoiler lol) Or rather, the basketball scenes represent good sex between them as opposed to something fraught and ashamed. And the prologue sets the scene for that, using the first person plural — a sort of sexual and romantic entanglement — and so focused on the body, on its hunger for collision and connection.
Anyway, my approach is about the revealing I was talking about. I don’t focus on making the sex good for the characters because that is typically boring. What is interesting is bad sex or scared sex or shameful sex or confusing sex or, more likely, sex that is many things at once — dialectical and complex. I use sex scenes to reveal psychological defenses, character history, desires, gender explorations, fear, trauma, expectations, biases, the capacity for empathy, judgments and prejudices, ego and selfishness, and beyond. And what is the distance between what the character thinks sex can give them and what it actually can? What does it take? What is it incapable of providing?
Can you talk about structuring A Sharp and Endless Need? It is set just at the end of high school, as I mentioned before, how did you decide how much time it should contain? How close to the end of the school year to start it? And told from what vantage point? Our narrator is reflecting on the events from the future but we do not learn about that future. What was your process like for creating the timeframe for the novel?
I wanted the novel to follow a relatively short period of time — albeit a very intense one. And I wanted to turn the pressure cooker way up. These two have until spring of their senior year to commit to a college — that’s my ticking clock, that’s the time monster they are up against for the duration of the book. And while committing to a school to play college ball is a hopeful thing, it also marks the end of something, of their time playing together, of their time living in the same town let alone state or part of the country — unless of course they make the leap and commit to the same school.
And in general, making it mainly follow their senior year allowed me to tackle Mack’s contradiction of being afraid of change / to make a decision and afraid of staying the same / getting stuck where they are. It’s such a pivotal and life-changing year. It feels huge when you are in it, like the only thing that matters. And sometimes, looking back, you realize how insignificant the time really was. But sometimes you don’t — sometimes it still looms large, no matter the distance, the years you put between you and the past. That’s what it is for Mack. We get the sense, from the epilogue, that Mack’s point of writing is many years later. They’ve reckoned with a lot of things, but still, Liv lingers. The choices they did and did not make linger.
And honest to god, I started it at the end of junior year so I could have Mack and their dad go to a Sixers game and so I could write about Iverson. He was my favorite player growing up and it gave me a lot of joy to put him on the page. Plus, I wanted Mack and Liv to meet before Liv transfers and senior year starts so that they have the opportunity to develop their connection more or less in private first, before it is on display for the team, and boys, and fans to see.
To continue the idea of time, what is it about the time period, the early 2000s, that A Sharp and Endless Need is set in that was important to the story?
I mean, that’s when I grew up. I have no idea what it’s like to be a teenager now beyond, like, what I see on TikTok and hear from parents of teens. But I don’t know the experience first-hand; I don’t know anything about the unique horrors of coming of age right now, in the time of social media, misinformation, countless school shootings, and a wealth of LGBTQ+ media representation (juxtaposed against two Trump presidencies and our country’s descent into fascism). Anyway! All that is to say, it felt true to set it then. It was a weird time to grow up, especially as a queer and nonbinary teen who didn’t have the language for my desires. I had access to the internet but I used it to chat my friends, talk to dykes in AIM chatrooms, and Ask Jeeves if I was gay once a week. It was the time of people saying “That’s so gay” about anything that was stupid.
I didn’t know any queer or trans people in real life, and when it came to celebrities, I only knew of like Ellen, Lance Bass, and maybe a guy on The Real World or Road Rules. I mean, I looked at the WNBA and thought, There are definitely a bunch of lesbians out there, but the league pressured them to stay closeted and present as more feminine. When Sheryl Swoops came out in 2005, I know it was a huge deal, but I don’t even remember hearing about it (probably too busy in those chat rooms and falling for others players). I guess what I’m trying to say is that it was a time rich with possibility yet still rife with alienation and despair. I suppose you could say that about our current time, too, but for different reasons. But ultimately, I wanted to tap into how lonely and painful it was to be a closeted queer, trans teenager in 2004, especially in a red town, in a red state. Basketball was the only safe romance I could have.
In the acknowledgments you thank Hanif Abdurraqib for inspiring you with his writing about basketball. What other inspirations did you notice as you wrote A Sharp and Endless Need?
Oh my god, so many. We the Animals by Justin Torres is one of my favorite novels of all time — I’ve probably read it one hundred times. His use of rhythm and repetition influenced my first-person plural prologue and epilogue. I mean, his fingerprints are all over them. Some other books/scripts/stories I read while I was drafting my novel were Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, Moonlight by Barry Jenkins, Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx as well as the script by Ossana and Larry McMurtry, Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump, So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen, and Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese (which has incredibly beautiful hockey writing).
I wanted to immerse myself in the tender aching horror of coming of age, especially as a queer person. And I also wanted to enter the headspace of athletes in pursuit of something: in So Many Olympic Exertions, she’s looking, through moments of failure or despair in sports, for answers about life after the suicide of her close friend. In Indian Horse, the protagonist, Saul, a First Nations boy in a horribly abusive residential school, uses ice hockey to cope with his trauma.
FICTION A Sharp Endless Need
By Marisa Crane
The Dial Press
Published May 13, 2025
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