When it comes to writing that’s defined my life, there are few artists more important to me than Mac Crane. It’s not something I say easily. The art I love holds a piece of my heart, and that isn’t something I’m quick to give away. But when I first read Crane’s debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself, I had no other choice. Their writing helped me redefine my relationship to my own shame and showed me the ways institutions use shame to validate systems of surveillance and marginalization. They wrote with an assurance of love in the face of evil that’s stayed with me for years. It revitalized my belief that the best way to fight those institutions is through community care. Yet somehow, I learned just as much from their second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, as I did from their first.

The novel is a first-person narration by Mackenzie “Mack” Morris, a high school senior and point guard living in small town Pennsylvania in 2004, facing the looming deadline of college signing. The year is laced with equal parts sorrow and desire, beginning with the death of Mack’s father. In dying, Mack’s father leaves behind an inescapable amount of credit card debt, shifting Mack’s future scholarship from a matter of pride to a matter of necessity. Losing their father also means that Mack loses the parent who sees one of the most essential parts of themselves: who they are as a player.

On the other side of that grief comes Liv, a transfer student who joins the team and tears into every aspect of Mack’s life. The two are drawn to each other immediately, sharing a chemistry on the court that jumps off the page through masterful description. They each hold an innate understanding of the mind and body of the other, pushing each other beyond the boundaries of what they were told was possible. This goes for both their athletic plays and how they’re allowed to see each other. In playing basketball, they are able to give space to their queerness before speaking it out loud into the universe. As Crane writes, “But we knew, in the deeps of our hips, that basketball was more erotic than dancing; it was collaboration, a mutual creation, a way of fucking without touching.”

One of the many things I love about this novel is the way it is able to highlight the intersection of sex and basketball. It’s the language of bodies. At their heart, great sex and great basketball rely on the same fundamental principles: trust, attention, collaboration, and a desire to create something with whoever you’re with.

The time Mack spends around Liv brings their queerness to center stage, something both beautiful and dangerous. Being a queer teenager in a red town in a red state in 2004 comes with heartbreaks. Mack lives in a world where they aren’t given the language they need to express their queerness fully. Both Mack and Liv must deal with mothers who want the most convenient versions of their children, not the children they actually have. Men are allowed to push into both of their lives because they are told it’s their right. Crane writes of all these experiences with a sharpness that cuts deep into the heart of the reader.

The most brutal scene occurs when Mack’s teammates start mocking Dani, a lesbian player on a rival team. It’s not just the hatefulness of these comments that hurts; it’s the fact that they are coming from the people who are supposed to have Mack’s back the most — the people with whom they are supposed to share a sacred teammate bond. That kind of betrayal has the highest potential for hurt, and it forces readers to look fully into the ugly jaws of shame externalized and internalized homophobia create. In these moments, Liv becomes a place of refuge for Mack: “I simply wished Liv would, somehow, against all sense, all understanding of the world and how it works, choose me.”

As the novel progresses, the pressure of Mack’s college signing builds. Scouts come from around the country to watch Mack’s team play, joining stands full of people watching and passing their judgments. Part of being an athlete, especially on such a high level, is putting on a performance and being judged for that performance. As Mack puts it: “It occurred to me that most spectators only like athletes for what they give them: money, pride, excitement, and entertainment. Otherwise, they’ll write them off faster than the time it takes AI to shake a defender.”

Through Mack, we experience the pressure and devastation of letting your team down in front of a crowd. But on the other end of that devastation, there’s a euphoric high, an ability to become a basketball god. The feeling can be intoxicating. It’s one that’s easy to conflate with love.

The pressure, stress, and grief of Mack’s life push them into substance use, drinking and doing whatever drugs become available to them. Addiction so often fills the space where care is supposed to be. It finds people when they don’t have the tools to have peace within their bodies and lives. One of the most common misconceptions I’ve heard around young competitive athletes is that they’re unlikely to use substances, much less struggle with substance abuse. A large part of that misconception comes from the morality complex people have around substance use. Moral purity teaches us to look down on athletes who fall into addictive cycles instead of asking why they ended up there in the first place. The world responds with punitive measures instead of love, care, and curiosity, making it incredibly difficult for young, vulnerable athletes to get what they need.

Obviously, not every athlete falls into addictive cycles, but selling the narrative that aspiring D-1 athletes are unlikely to struggle with substance use ignores the pressures they experience in their daily lives. In high-level athletics, there’s a thin line between ambition and self-destruction. It’s a line Mack has had to walk ever since they decided they wanted to play D-1. We live in a world where athletes are told they have a narrow window of value. Burn bright until you burn out. The arena we’ve created doesn’t give young players a full view of what their life can be beyond their glory on the court. That’s something Mack has to seek out on their own.

This novel asks readers to look unflinchingly into the most brutal truths of life. We force people to mirror the systems that hurt them in order to survive. Love is far closer to violence than most of us are prepared to admit. Addiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum and never has. Greatness will never be a substitute for love.

In sharing these truths, the novel also invites us to expand our imagination of what the world can be. This story operates like a sign wave: The dip of tragedy is paired with the inverse possibility of what love can do for us in the face of that tragedy. Crane gives us all of this in a novel that’s vibrant and grimy and hot and poetic and aching. Though this novel is a love letter to basketball, you don’t have to love or even understand basketball to read it. Within these pages basketball isn’t just a sport; it’s a way of speaking to the expansiveness of desire and the human condition. Though the depths of that condition can so often feel like they are beyond language, Crane’s more than up for the job.

A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane is out now.

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