Weirdly Instinctual Human Attraction
The world is just one big slimy oyster, isn’t it?
You know when you get really into two different things at the same time and although they are completely unrelated aside from the fact of your simultaneous consumption of them, they become forevermore inextricably linked in your mind? I’m having a moment like that right now with the novel A Sharp, Endless Need by Mac Crane and the entire musical catalog of the Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey. There are commonalities between both of these artists, as well as between the style, tone, and subject matter of their respective arts, that makes them feel as if they are meant to hold hands. Both Mac and Alex hold influential positions in the queer space. Both are outspoken activists and heart-on-their-sleeve romantics. Both are super into sports, namely basketball and rugby. Hell, they even bear a striking physical resemblance to each other. But it is their work that creates such a lovely link between them, that makes me feel enveloped as I take them both in
A Sharp, Endless Need centers on Mack and Liv, two high school basketball stars navigating a turbulent senior year being scouted by college coaches, dealing with the death of Mack’s father and the absence of Liv’s, and exploring the charged and dangerous connection between them. They become entwined in the distinctly adolescent entanglement of lofty ambition and the temptation of self-destruction, while figuring out how to define their queerness and shape an identity around the gaping holes of loss in their lives.
This is a uniquely positioned book. It’s marketed as a romance, a coming-of-age novel and has been compared to both Call Me by Your Name and Pizza Girl, two novels I loved but with which I find little commonalities between, and neither of which seem to resemble this one. I would almost venture to call this book YA, not just based on the characters’ ages, but because the tone and pacing is distinctly YA. The emotions are sweeping, intensifying and deescalating with a marked rapidity, often with little pretense and zero processing — a distinctly teenage trajectory. The dialogue is both loaded and guarded, every interaction full to the brim with meaning that the characters’ just barely allow to leak through, except when they are saying things that are gorgeously profound, sometimes more so than the moment calls for but lovely just the same. Mac does an incredibly sharp and observant job of witnessing how, from a teenage perspective, every moment, every decision, and every conversation feels so monumental, so big and consequential. But just as the best authors of YA are able to do, they don’t condescend or minimize the reality of those big feelings. Instead of patronizing what could be seen from adult eyes as teenage drama, Mac allows it to proliferate into something stunningly alive:
“Those afternoons, practicing together, it felt like we were collaborating on something that predated language. Something so primitive you could only revert to that wild state by pushing your body to ill-advised limits. By pushing so hard that you eventually found what was on the other side of fear. Of loneliness. What we found in each other was a recognition so potent, so concentrated, we could hardly stomach it.”
While Mac adorns the experiences of youth, Alex Lahey strips them down, simplifies them. Her lyrics are far from esoteric, less like poetry and more like a casual chat with a friend, but it is that simplicity that makes them relatable. There’s no complicated guessing about the underlying story or suspension of belief necessary in order to engage. It’s all out there, plain and undeniable. And her songs aren’t necessarily targeting a teenage audience, but the universality of the lyrics make them applicable to a wide range of experiences:
Distracting me from what's important
But you don't care, and I'm losing focus
You push me to the edge, and then you pull me back
I swear to God, I'll have a heart attack
My skin's breaking out and I don't like what I see
When I walk past shiny surfaces, I don't like being me
You say that you want me but you don't act like you do
I'm pretty sure my mum said be careful around you.
-I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself
It’s the sound, however, of Alex Lahey’s music that makes it feel particularly youthful. Similarly to her lyrics, the music is uncomplicated. It’s smart, it’s catchy as hell, but it’s not taking any enormous musical risks. It’s easy to listen to. Nearly every song is upbeat and energetic, and even the more angry ones never venture into a territory of darkness. It maintains an air of wholesomeness, of hope. This is the kind of music you blast with the windows on the first day of summer vacation, or what you listen to while you’re packing for college, or is playing in the background when you’re hanging out in a parking lot with your friends and hoping your crush is going to show up. Which is why it seems to fit so seamlessly with this book. Both bear witness to the confusion and intensity of youth while still noting that it's temporary, a convoluted means to the ends of adulthood, as well as forgivable.
Recommended Reading
Obviously, “A Sharp, Endless Need” by Mac Crane. Listen to Alex Lahey while you’re at it.
What I’m Consuming
Bad Bunny
As per usual, I’m embarrassingly late to the party here, but Bad Bunny has finally come onto my radar. Last year we had brat summer, and this year we have DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS summer. This is the shit I’m going to be annoying the neighbors with when I blast it in my backyard while drinking sour beers and plastic-axe throwing with my kids all summer long. Don’t get me wrong — I love discovering a musical artist that’s brand new and being able to follow them from the beginning, but it’s just as exciting to find someone that already has a few albums under their belt, sometimes an entire catalog of music, and you have what seems like an endless supply of new bangers to discover. That’s Bad Bunny for me right now. Who needs DuoLingo? Not me.
Prompt
“Button-sized eggs and teapot cities: A peek into the big, wide world of miniatures” -NPR, 5/19/25
I am obsessed with this article, with the richness of these tiny little tableaus. There is so much here, not just visually, but in the psychology behind the weirdly instinctual human attraction to miniature things. The satisfaction of control, the lulling tedium of the work of their creation, the pleasantly overwhelming information overload, it all seems like a silly microcosm of simple pleasures somewhere at the intersection of art and gamification and performance.
There’s a story here. Somewhere. Let anything about this article — the individual creators, the miniatures community, the scenes themselves — spark something for you. Dig deep for the psychological drive underneath the surface absurdity.
Writing Updates
Not gonna lie, I haven’t been feeling a ton of drive to write lately. I’ve got ideas floating around but haven’t had the energy or desire to sit down and put words on a page for a couple of weeks. There’s intimidation in the starting part, in sticking a pin down and letting the story crystallize from there, and I feel like that’s part of what’s been holding me back as of late. It’s all okay — I know the drive will resurface, and breaks from anything are essential to keeping the fire burning. I do have a couple of cool writing-adjacent things coming down the pipeline this summer and am excited to share those with the world and ride the tailwinds of their momentum.
Now that the memoir manuscript is done (for the moment) I’m asking myself what I want to do next, what I want to do with my writing over the summer. I want to find some more open submission calls to submit the manuscript for, and maybe consider venturing into the querying mire. I want to write some weird fiction, some absurd short stories, and send those out. I want to finish all the stories I’ve started and then abandoned when life got too busy. I’m not feeling my novel a ton right now, but I want to chip away at that when and if the desire reemerges. I want to journal with more consistency. I want to do more readings, be more active in my local writing scene, and integrate more of a community aspect into my writing. What I’m saying is that I have goals, I have options, and pretty soon I will have a lot more time. The world is just one big slimy oyster, isn’t it?
Speaking of all the stories I haven’t finished, this is one I started last summer that is on that list of pieces I want to complete sooner than later:
“Is this some kind of joke?” Frank asked Tilly. Standing there in the short hallway, dim with the late afternoon light streaming orange through the curtains, he held the photo out to her. It was a shitty photocopied printout, the image shot through with light streaks from a lack of toner, but it was clear what it was: bulbous tits, comically fluffy bush, limbs all akimbo in some unnatural formation of the human form, doe eyes like a child.
Tilly’s face scrunched into a look of disgust and she pulled away from the photo, as if the model’s naked body was about to jump out at her. “Dad! What the hell? Why do you have that?”
Frank drew the photo back, suddenly ashamed that he had just exposed his teenage daughter to pornography. “So you haven’t seen this before?”
“What do you mean? Have I ever seen a naked woman before? Seen porn before?”
“No, no no. I mean, this one, this photo. This isn’t yours?”
“What the fuck, dad? No, it’s not mine! Where did you get that?”
“I…I found it. It was on the desk in the office, with the other ones.”
“Other ones?”
At that, Lydia walked down the hall to meet them. She was holding a dish towel, mopping some effluence of dinner-to-be off of her hands. “What was on the desk in the office?”Frank instinctually pressed the face of the photo into his chest, curling the offending image away from his wife. Tilly crumpled too, confused, vicariously embarrassed. After a few looks bounced around between the three of them like a tennis match, he cautiously revealed the image. Lydia gave the exact same look as her daughter, an identical scrunch and retreat, before snatching the piece of paper from his hands.
“What the fuck, Frank?” she spat as her wide eyes moved up and down the image. “Why the fuck do you have this?”
Frank was sure Tilly would have giggled at her mother’s use of not one but two curse words, if the situation was a little less grievous, a little less sinister. He looked back and forth between them, identical looks of disgust and confusion a generation apart, and realized he would have to be the one to fix this.
“I…I found them,” he stuttered. He motioned to the door of the office, half open. “They were in the office when I got home.”
Tilly was the first to turn down the hallway and walk in on the scene, Frank and Lydia a few steps behind her. She immediately drew her hands up to her mouth in a shock when the full tableau came into view.
In front of them, scattered across the desk in no discernable order but in an array meant to provide a full and complete view, an immediate noticing, were dozens of pornographic photos. All were printed on the same generic office printer paper as the one in Frank’s hand, all crumpled and wrinkled and worn, as if someone had carried them around loosely in a backpack for many weeks, like a piece of forgotten homework. Some were full-color, cyan and magenta and yellow mixing in perfect pixelated layers to form the shapes of the women’s bodies, all that exposed skin. Some were the same streaky black and white as the one still held in Frank’s sweaty hands, bearing the same shadowy tracks of a shitty copy machine. All were women, alone, splayed in a variety of poses, from the tasteful and demure to the shockingly bold and extreme. Frank knew he should be shielding his wife and his daughter from this indecency, this debasement of femininity, but he was too confused about how they ended up here to do anything at all.
All three of them took in the scene for a moment, silent, pacing and gazing back and forth like they were observing an art installation in a museum, before Lydia spoke.
“What do you mean you found these? Frank, this is disgusting!”
Frank shook his head nervously. “I found them. I came home from work. I set my things in the dining room. I grabbed a beer. I was going to come in here and play some poker, and I saw all this.” He motioned to the slew of photos, to his beer, already cracked, that he’d set down on the corner of the desk and forgotten about. The sweating can had left a ring of condensation on one of the photos, smearing the ink like a wound across the woman’s bare chest. He spit it out quickly, all his steps, as if his wife was accusing him, like he wasn’t so much caught in the act but like this was some fucked-up ruse to her turn on gone awry. His admission that he was about to play online poker, a habit Lydia despised and one he frequently was less than truthful with her about, only made it worse, admitting to a lesser crime to avoid the worst accusation.
Lydia picked up a photo, one of a woman with her long, tan legs spread wide, her French-tipped fingers caressing the lips of her perfect pink Barbie pussy, her heaving breasts lolling to each side of her like a tongue out of a cow’s mouth. The paper was especially crumpled right at the place where the woman’s face was printed, obscuring her expression, leaving it unknown how she was feeling about this particular pose she had been directed to strike.
“You’re telling me,” Lydia continued, “that these just appeared here, out of thin air? This smut just magically showed up?”
“I know it sounds crazy, Lyd, but that’s the God’s honest truth. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“Was the door locked?” Tilly asked.
“Was the door locked?” Frank repeated.
“The front door,” she clarified. “To the house. Did you lock it behind you when you left for work today or did you leave it open?”
Frank closed his eyes and thought through his steps — he’d been the last to leave the house after Lydia left for her office and Tilly hopped on the bus to school, and the first to arrive home, just a few minutes before the others. He couldn’t recall much of the morning — he’d stayed up all night worrying about the drop, that everything would go according to plan, that he could trust Ian was going to take care of everything — but there was no reason he wouldn’t lock the door behind him, a force of habit he obeyed every single day without thinking. And, that’s right, he specifically remembered having to unlock the door when he got home, having to dig through the errant screws and plaster and chunks of drywall in his pockets to find his keys, nicking his fingertip on an open utility knife.
“I locked it. I always lock it.”
Lydia examined a photo of a girl that looked barely over Tilly’s age. She had curtain bangs, an enormous floral tattoo snaking down the middle of her back. Her gaze was strong over her shoulder, like she was trying to speak through it.
“You swear to God these aren’t yours?” Lydia held the corner of the picture with her fingertips, as if it soiled her to touch it.
Frank sighed heavily. “No, Lyd. They aren’t mine.”
Lydia stared into the girl’s eyes. “Well fuck, do you think we need to call the police?”
“No!” Frank exclaimed, drawing both his wife’s and daughter’s eyes onto him, before composing himself. “I think that’s going a little far. We don’t need to be alarmist about this.”
“Excuse me, alarmist?” said Lydia. “Someone broke into our house. Someone desecrated our property. I think that is a pretty perfect reason to raise alarm.”
Thanks for reading, as always. Stay well and keep joy.
xoxo,
brit