On Persisting: An Interview with Marisa (Mac) Crane

By Kate Sullivan

Marisa (Mac) Crane is the author of the debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, in which a queer, first-time parent must navigate child-rearing while grieving the loss of her partner to childbirth. This is all amidst a sinister surveillance state from a government that assigns extra shadows to people for everything from unintentional mistakes, to acts of harm or violence. These individuals, or “Shadesters,” are relegated to a lesser class of citizenship; Crane, a close personal friend of mine, renders panopticism as a new normal. In March 2023, The New York Times picked I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself as a recommended book of the week.

Why did you want to tell this particular story?

I consider the core of the book to be about shame. At its heart, I wanted to tell the story that I relate to, even if it’s not something I’ve been through myself. I spent so long struggling with shame and guilt over certain things in my life, like hurting people or behaving in ways that weren’t consistent with how I wanted to be.

The seed of this book was because I wrote a shaming poem about myself, for myself, that was supposed to make me feel better. There was a line: “if the shadows of everyone you’ve ever hurt followed you around day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with everyone’s hearts?” And that didn’t work really, but the image and the idea stayed with me because then I came up with that first line of the book “the kid is born with two shadows,” years later. 

I didn’t know what the shadows meant, I didn’t know how it connected to anything or whether it was a story or a novel. Clearly it was speculative. I initially thought it was a good way to live, with shadows following you around forever as like this threat, and then obviously flipped it on its head because that would make a terrible society and be oppressive and not help people. How would a baby be born with a second shadow?

At the time, [my wife] Ash and I were talking about family making, but hadn’t started trying yet. We had sort of generally been doing research, checking out clinics and looking at the sperm bank, and all of that was really big and scary. I was just playing all of the worst case scenarios in my head, you know, one of which was maybe Ash dies during childbirth, one of which was that she has a miscarriage or a stillbirth or something like that. I just channeled my own fears and anxieties and just sort of helped Kris's story be more textured and authentic.

Grief is obviously a big theme to what Kris is dealing with from the beginning. But there's so much humor here, and it’s a deeply funny book. How did you balance and fuse those emotions together to help move the story forward?

Early on, I didn't think that humor belonged in this space. But once I read Mary Robison and Jenny Offill, and read and reread them, I saw how much humor is in their stories. Along with [Rachel Khong’s] Goodbye, Vitamin, which was really influential for me in my early drafts because while that book is about the main character’s anticipatory grief surrounding her father’s battle with dementia, it’s also filled with humor, fragmentation, and weirdness. [It] created space for humor to coexist alongside trauma.

As far as the balance goes, I think what was really helpful for me in Kris’s grief was that she would be looking back on memories [of] funny or weird situations. So there was a way to find balance. Yes, she might be really sad, but she’s also remembering the joyful, funny, silly moments as well. Raising a kid is like the weirdest, funniest experience.

The kid isn't named until the end of the book. I'm curious about that decision and why it was important for you as a writer, and also for readers to interact with that character as the kid before knowing their name.

It’s meant to represent that closing of the space between them, that distance that Kris had always kept her at arm's length, emotionally and psychologically. It's that collapsing of space and the movement from “I” to “we.”

It can be difficult to write really good and real sex, and I’m wondering how you approached writing the sex scenes in this book. Were there any influences from literature or film or anything that helped you infuse such life into those scenes?

Carmen Maria Machado, Garth Greenwell, James Baldwin were all really helpful. I feel like I've returned to Giovanni's Room, Baldwin’s writing of the body and desire, and Garth Greenwell’s ‘Sex and Literature’ seminar. He thought about it in terms of a scale, with the most grounded and embodied sex being on one side, and on the other side, ethereal. Sex can move through that scale. The whole scene doesn’t need to focus on the body parts or be completely abstract. You can move through this spectrum of abstractness and then ground it with the body. I think the similarities between sex writing and sports writing are really profound for me. In sex and sports writing we communicate with our bodies. Sports and sex also feel like a place where deeper desires can come out of a person that maybe they didn't know about. Sex can pull out different aspects of a person and reveal motivation or unconscious things.

I know you as a writer with many modes: you've written poetry, nonfiction, and works that transcend categories. The book’s style reminded me of a quote from an Ocean Vuong reading from a few years ago. Bear with me: “...poetry as praxis of fracture: the line break itself and the caesura within the line break is a moment of destruction orchestrated. I think in that way it starts to mingle with queer theory, where one often sees breakage as failure. But for so many queer folks, failure is a way forward. So many times, we had to fail in a society that did not consider our bodies worthwhile. And we move forward despite that, we fail forward.” Your experimental techniques relate to this mingling. What inspired you to use fragments to relate to existing as a queer person?

There’s a sense that grief fragments us so much and it's not linear. It's not like those five stages or whatever, it's unpredictable and chaotic, it can come at you fast and have this ebb and flow. It could fragment your memories, too. That’s what I think the form does so well to mimic Kris trying to be present in her everyday life and parent as best as she possibly can with the tools that she has. 

Fragments have an entrance and an exit and that was so helpful for me to hold every line accountable. There’s no hiding when it comes to fragments. Everything is so visible and apparent. It just made me focus on every single word and also push every description and line to higher standards.

What Ocean [Vuong] says about queer people failing forward is so spot on. I know I personally resonate with that. Ever since I can remember, I never felt like I knew how to be a person in the world. Or, I felt like I was doing it all wrong. My life felt like a million missteps, full of confusion, disconnect, shame, and grief. Kris stumbles a lot, she makes a lot of mistakes. She doesn't quite have her footing in the world, but she finds a way to persist. I think that's beautiful.