Marisa Crane: On Basketball as Performance, the Dark Side of Perfectionism, the Jock-to-Writer Pipeline, and Their New Book ‘A Sharp Endless Need’
If you asked me about books in 2023 I likely talked your ear off about Mac (Marisa) Crane’s I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (Catapult, 2025), a queer, speculative novel set in a version of the United States where people are given second shadows instead of prison time for crimes. It was heartwarming and hilarious, the text interspersed with rhetorical polls, the dry wit of which revealed the protagonists’ internal struggles.
Crane’s sophomore novel was highly anticipated for me, and did not disappoint. Set in Pittsburgh in the early 2000s, A Sharp Endless Need (The Dial Press, 2025) follows high school basketball player Mack as she forms a close friendship with a new teammate Liv, battles grief from her dad’s recent passing, and attempts to decide which basketball scholarship she will accept for college: a life-defining choice.
The book is full of teenagers drinking in basements, teenagers drinking in cars, teenagers drinking on basketball courts at night—scenes familiar to any millennial. Crane does an exceptional job dropping us into the world of high schoolers in the early aughts. It’s so easy to forget, now, how taboo queerness was when we were young. It’s hard to remember sometimes, from the perch of adulthood, how horrifying it was to be seen as different at fifteen. As Mack’s teammates gossip about a girl on another team dating a girl, I felt as if I were inhabiting Mack’s body myself. My own face heated, a tingle of fear and intrigue worked its way up my spine. Early in the book, when Liv tells Mack she has perfect hands within minutes of meeting her, I screamed out loud. This book has all the lesbian longing of Portrait of a Lady on Fire stuffed into a Pennsylvania suburb.
Over email, I had the privilege of talking with Mac about the pressure put on young athletes, what we inherit from where we grow up, and the intertwinement of queerness and basketball.
Kim Narby: In so much of the book basketball is referred to as a performance; Mack’s love for basketball is very intrinsically tied to her need for the love and affection she gets from fans when she plays. The entire book is seeped in this pressure young athletes face: to make decisions for their future, to provide entertainment for adults, to provide financial support for their families. It reminded me of some of the documentaries that have come out recently on child actors. Does being a young athlete make someone have to grow up faster? In what ways?
Marisa Crane: This is a difficult and interesting question. Yes and no. Yes, because our culture encourages amateur athletes from a relatively young age to treat their sport like their career (in hopes that it one day becomes one), to be so devoted to it to the point that we wind up sacrificing other parts of our lives (hobbies, social things, other sports that put us at risk of injury, vacations, etc.). In that way, maybe it feels like young athletes are forced to grow up faster ([for example] to behave like career-obsessed adults in the US), which makes me feel all The Little Prince about it, like: wow, grown ups suck, they have no idea what’s really important in life.
On the flip side of that, I’ve found in my experience that many athletes are stunted, maturity-wise. Maybe it’s because of the hyperfocus on the sport that some other areas go underdeveloped. Or maybe because they treat their sport like their career from a young age, they aren’t exposed to as many different life experiences. There is a sort of tunnel visioning that happens. When I graduated from college and wasn’t playing high-level basketball anymore, I went through an intense period of grief and shock, as if I hadn’t fully been a part of the world until then—my world had been very small, relatively speaking, and yet, it had felt like everything.
KN: Is it possible to prevent putting this pressure on student athletes?
MC: It is possible but it would require a huge overhaul culturally of how we view and treat youth sports, to prioritize joy, and fun, and connection over potential and discipline. It’s not like learning discipline is a bad thing, but now that I’m a parent, I’m thinking about youth sports through a different lens. I want my children to feel safe and supported when they try new sports, to center joy in trying new things. I’m afraid of the day one of them winds up with a bully of a coach and I’m going to have to let loose on that bully.
Also, we need an overhaul of the educational system while we are at it. Free college for everyone would eliminate the pressures of receiving a full athletic scholarship, especially for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford college. It’s a reality of the piece of shit country we live in that sports are the only ticket to an education for many athletes, and subsequently to financial security.
KN: What advice would you give competitive high school athletes, or to someone like your character Mack?
MC: I guess it depends on what their goals are. And if they’re anything like Mack, or me, for that matter, they might not listen to any advice a washed up old thirty-four-year-old has to offer. My impulse was to remind them that this doesn’t last forever, that one day they’ll have to reckon with losing the sport as they know it and that it’s going to be a huge loss, an unimaginable grief, and that they should spend their time loving other things, too, in finding other hobbies and interests and passions. But that all feels like projection. Everybody’s experience is so different—not everyone has made the mistakes I’ve made. Not everyone needs the reminders I do. I suppose advice that feels worthwhile is to just remember who you are off the court, field, etc. Don’t wrap your entire identity up in this one thing—you are so much more than the sport you play, so much more than how well you play and where the sport takes you.
KN: As a parent, if your kids decide to go into sports, are there certain decisions you would make based on your own experience to support them in more specific ways?
MC: Oh, absolutely. I think I would overcompensate, first of all, and try to put the least amount of pressure on them as possible to succeed or to turn this fun thing into a career. I already feel myself doing it with my four-year-old. “Just have fun, baby! That’s all that matters! Embrace joy!” I don’t ever remember “fun” being emphasized growing up. Not that my parents put an immense amount of pressure on me but fun was never a priority. It was just about my own lofty goals and what I was willing to do to achieve them. Make me better, I demanded, to my brother and dad and coaches.
With my kids, I also plan to prioritize mental health in a way that was simply unheard of when I was a child in the ’90s. Normalize and start therapy. Have open conversations about what their relationships with their coaches should be like, signs of psychological abuse, etc. Have open conversations about eating disorders, nourishing their bodies, intuitive eating, all that good stuff. How to care for their bodies when they’re injured and never to play hurt even if their coach is pressuring them to. Basically just bringing the dark side of athletics into the light. Exposing all the shit.
KN: Consumption is such a theme in this novel—Mack herself as something for fans to consume, and when Mack thinks about Liv, she talks about wanting to devour her, bite her. I saw this almost as a reaction to herself being consumed by strangers: her attraction to Liv being a type of consumption she can control. As a former basketball player, someone who was perhaps once in similar shoes to Mack, have you found yourself able to find pleasure in basketball now without the element of performance or consumption?
MC: For me, basketball has always had two sides: the very private, shooting-in-the-dark-to-clear-your-head moments, the private practice, the millions of shots we get up to prepare for the performance and then of course, the performance. I still find something like joy, maybe more like relief, in shooting around alone, the repetition and music of it, the time travel of it. And now, having kids gives me a new form of pleasure. I enjoy shooting hoops with my four-year-old out front in the street, commentating for him, pretending to be an announcer. His joy gives me a joy that I think I would have trouble accessing, otherwise. But to be honest, it’s hard to find pleasure playing actual 5-on-5, whether it’s pickup games or an organized league, often because of the consumption. Every year, I continue to get worse and worse, my handles get rusty, my shot feels off. I have my fourth torn ACL of my life right now and refuse to get it fixed. So, I’m slow side to side, I can’t quite jump off that leg. I’m a walking, hobbling has-been, and while I know some people find joy in playing forever, for the sake of the game, I’m not one of those people. If I’m not as good as I once was, I almost can’t stand it, to fall short, to be reminded of the limits of my body in real time, and to have others witness my limits and failure. I think it’s something I’ll be working through for the rest of my life.
KN: Drugs and alcohol are very prevalent in this story. For Mack, it seems to be an outlet for her to deal with the perfectionism required in her basketball career. But I couldn’t help notice how much alcohol is used as a coping mechanism for the adults in the story as well. It made me wonder whether sports had more of an impact than locale—a small, working class city closer to middle America. How do you think place shapes you as a person? Is it possible to escape that?
MC: I really like talking about the substance use aspect of the novel because I know a lot of people have this image of athletes as like “straight edge” or being good and kind and healthy to our bodies (ha). But the fact of the matter is that competitive athletes are often more likely to struggle with substance misuse and addiction than non-athletes. For a million reasons. And dealing with the perfectionism and pressure is definitely part of it for Mack. It’s also growing up a closeted queer and nonbinary kid (without the language) in such a close-minded shitty place, without any role models or community. Mack is, for all intents and purposes, alone, and the booze and drugs keep them company.
Place shapes Mack in such a way that they don’t ever consider not drinking or doing drugs; it’s so ingrained in the culture, and everyone is doing it for their own private reasons. No one is saying, “Wow, does anyone know what’s wrong with Mack? Why are they drinking so much?” They’re saying, “Hey, where can I get some?”
Whether it’s possible to escape, that I’m not sure I’m prepared to answer just yet. Maybe for some people true escape—not just physical escape—is possible. But me, I carry these places with me wherever I go.
KN: Your instagram bio says: “Jock to writer pipeline.” How did that happen? Were you always a writer too?
MC: As a kid, I said I wanted to be an author and play in the WNBA. So, the aspirations were there, at least. But, I’m 5 feet 4 ½ (the half matters) and also simply not good enough to play in the WNBA (though the height is always a convenient excuse). But one out of two isn’t so bad. Writing always took a backseat, though. Basketball was my everything, and it was my everything since I was very young. Hours in the gym and in the driveway, learning new skills, shooting hundreds of foul shots and threes. Forcing my brother and dad to rebound for me, to play tough defense on me. Weekends and weeks spent traveling to tournaments. Though I declared that I wanted to be an author, I don’t think I actually thought it was something you could do with your life. I thought all authors were dead except for that famous one we don’t talk about. But I kept a notebook of very bad rhyming poetry in which I vented about this, that, and the other thing. And in college, somehow, I don’t know how, I wrote a novel very inspired by Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. The narrator wore sunglasses inside and was always on drugs. And she was caught up in a love triangle with two women, not unlike the two lacrosse players I was also in a love triangle with. I don’t know what happened to it. I think I simply deleted it.
KN: It’s a little surprising to me that we haven’t gotten more fiction in the teammates-to-potential-lovers realm outside of the romance genre, not only because it is so common in the queer community, but also because women’s sports are (thank god) really having a moment right now. Why were you drawn to tell this particular story?
MC: Tell me about it. I’m begging for more literary fiction about queerness and sports! Fingers crossed that we get more in the coming years. Man, I was drawn to telling this story because, well, not to be obvious, but because I lived something like it. Not the exact movements and drama of the book, of course, but the soul of it. And because for years, I’ve been thinking about how my queerness and basketball are so intertwined to the point that I can’t even separate them. My first experiences of queer desire were with teammates and opponents—in college I almost strictly dated women’s basketball players (with the exception of one artist). There was something very erotic to me about playing the thing I loved with someone I loved, someone I wanted more than anything in the world. The collaboration, the chemistry, the body language, the sweat, the private conversations, the sex of the game: once I’d experienced that heightened of a state, I thought, well, nothing could ever come close. To be frank, I avoided the topic for so long in my fiction because I internalized the idea that basketball wasn’t “literary” enough, that no one would take it seriously as a setting to explore the largest and most complicated questions about what it means to be a person in the world. And I had to get over that hang-up if I was ever going to give these characters and this story the shot I think they deserve.
KN: Do you find that meeting another basketball player in the wild is similar to meeting another queer person—there’s mutual experience? A mutual way of seeing the world?
MC: I meet too many basketball players all the time for that to be particularly exciting to me, especially because many of them are men and that affects the dynamic in ways that become complicated by gender and misogyny and all that shit. I get most excited about meeting writers who are also basketball players. It feels like a true joy, a kinship. I’ve talked to poets about how similar poetry is to the game of basketball (when played right) and it’s always so intoxicating when we can talk using that “shared language” with not one but two things that are integral to my being. A few years ago I found out that there’s always a pickup basketball game at AWP every year, and I went and played and just looked around in wonder. I think maybe what I love about the writer-jock situation is that growing up, it was communicated to me from a young age that you could be a jock or an artist but never both. Teammates teased me for having my nose in a book, for writing poetry. It seems so silly now, to allow others to limit me in that way, to internalize the high-school-clique-cafeteria-table mentality of human experience.
KN: In the Venn diagram of jocks and writers, what would land in the middle that is deeply ingrained in both worlds/professions?
MC: Perseverance. Thick skin. Ego. The desire to live forever. The audience’s obsession with an “overnight sensation.”
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Mac Crane is 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. Their sophomore novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is forthcoming in May 2025 from Dial Press. 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.
