The Terror of Fucking Up: A Conversation with Marisa Crane (Part 1)
Marisa Crane’s debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (Catapult, 2022), is about a parent named Kris grieving the loss of her wife while raising her kid in a near-future surveillance state that punishes ‘harmful’ actions with the assignment of extra shadows. Crane lives in San Diego with their wife and child. You can find more of their work in Ghost City Review, Catapult, the Offing, and at marisacrane.org
Brianna Avenia-Tapper: What was the initial image, idea, or question that became this book, and why was it important to you to write it?
Marisa Crane: There were two. Many years ago I was stuck in this cycle of hurting people and hurting myself. I wrote this short poem intended to shame me into making different decisions: “If the shadows of everyone you’ve ever hurt followed you around, day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with people’s hearts?” Then, a couple years ago, the first line of the novel popped into my head: “The kid is born with two shadows.” I wondered how a baby could be more or less born with a second shadow, and that’s how the inciting incident came to be. It felt important to write and explore because of my own relationship to shame, and how prevalent shame is in our society at large, how much we eat that shit up, and our punitive impulses.
BAT: Sometimes growing up Catholic felt to me like growing up with an extra shadow—as though I’d been born already needing to atone.
MC: Totally, I was raised Catholic as well, and there are definite parallels there. Catholicism doesn’t work without shame! Horrifyingly.
BAT: What did you learn about your own shame from writing this book?
MC: I was slow to come to the idea that nothing good can come from shaming myself. I felt I deserved to sit in that dark space. But the more I shamed myself, the worse I behaved, the further I fell into this spiral, and I eventually realized that nothing was going to change until I changed my perspective around my past and behaviors, as well as how I was labeling myself—a very good person, bad person binary, and I was a bad person, in my own eyes. I had to shake loose of that binary and the very idea that people are good and bad as opposed to most of us being flawed, messy people who are frequently harming people and being harmed. Of course, we can do our best to prevent harm and treat people with care and compassion, but we will inevitably hurt people. It’s about how we repair things after, how we communicate and commit to changing, etc. Once I stopped calling myself a monster or a bad person, I was able to treat myself with more compassion, I was able to give myself grace and forgiveness. Writing this book and giving Kris so much space to be messy AND heal (especially as a queer person and parent) was really healing for me as well.
BAT: I appreciated your choice of a protagonist who was a loving parent with flaws. As a mother, it means a lot to me to read about parents who are trying hard and making mistakes, as all of us do. How old was your child when you were writing IKMETM, and how did their presence in your life influence the book?
MC: I have one kid, a 2.5-year-old. When I started drafting IKMETM, he was just a thought or a dream. My wife and I had just started talking about having a baby, and I was filled with all of these big feelings that I channeled into Kris and this book—the unknown, the terror of failing, of not being a good parent, of fucking up the kid, of being ill-equipped to take on this lifelong, important task.
BAT: When the kid in IKMETM begins asking questions about her biological father, Kris struggles first with whether to provide information, and then struggles with her irreversible decision to use an anonymous sperm donor.
MC: I wrote into that huge conflict out of my own fears surrounding becoming a parent. I didn’t want to make the wrong irreversible decision, I didn’t want to make a decision at all without consulting my child even though he didn’t exist yet. It was this current of …wanting to empower my kid to give consent even though that’s not a possibility when they’re just a dream, a plan, a hope. While this isn’t exclusive to queer parents, I think it comes up a lot more for queer parents. Like, it was part of our conversation from the very beginning because there was no other option. And it brings in all these considerations about all the different ways to make a family.