In Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill, touch is restricted, bodies threaten to contaminate one another, and hybridized mushroom women sprout fungal growths that are shaved away so they appear more human. Cranehill’s debut novel follows one of these women, Nicole, whose wedding day coincides with her mother’s funeral. Nicole must navigate the restrictive norms of her home, a patriarchal and dystopian commune, even as she develops an illicit relationship with another wife and uncovers the secrets that grow at the heart of her society. Wife Shaped Bodies, firmly rooted in the speculative traditions of ecohorror and the Gothic, asks us to consider the cost of isolation and whether it is ever truly possible to contain the chaotic and generative potential of living beings.
Cranehill and I met on Zoom last month to discuss her beautiful sentences, how she incorporated real mushroom science into her novel, and the process of writing a first book. We also dug into the relationship between ecohorror and the domestic and what it might mean to move beyond humanity, to work toward a world shaped by connection and care, as the characters of Cranehill’s excellent book seek to do.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Audrey Bauman
I want to start by asking about your prose, which is so lush and gorgeous. Can you talk about how you think about language when you write? And when you were drafting this novel, was it language first or story first? Because I can see language as a kind of engine in your work.
Laura Cranehill
I came to writing through poetry, and so I just love the sound of language and writing beautiful things. I love writers who write beautifully—Carmen Maria Machado, Claire Oshetsky, C Pam Zhang. I also read a lot of poetry while I’m writing. I find that to be really helpful to get my brain going if I’m about to start on something, better even than prose.
I am definitely more narrative and story first, though because I love language so much, I’ll end up incorporating details and scenery because of the language. Also, if there’s something I’m researching in the science and I come up with a really gross image, then I have to work it into the book somehow. Because my favorite thing, honestly, is writing about something gross or horrific in a really beautiful way. That’s such a powerful experience, to take two opposing reactions, repulsion and beauty, and put them together. If you can make someone feel both of those things at the same time, it’s so powerful and complicated and I love that. That’s peak, golden, what I want to do when it comes to language.
Audrey Bauman
That juxtaposition of repulsion and attraction feels related to Nicole’s complex feelings towards Teaghan. Nicole’s attraction to Teaghan is almost compulsory, and it doesn’t always feel benign. What were you trying to explore with their relationship, and why is it Teaghan in particular that pulls Nicole towards unraveling the secrets of her community?
Laura Cranehill
I think you said it best about Nicole’s attraction being a compulsion more than anything. Her relationship with Teaghan is this faraway obsession she has with this other girl she’s been watching her whole life. It’s complicated because of Nicole’s isolation; I think isolation can really do a number on people. Because Nicole’s been kept apart from the other women for so long, she doesn’t really know how to interact or how to have that personal connection that she needs so deeply. So I wouldn’t say it’s love between her and Teaghan, it’s definitely sexual mostly. But there are deeper things like that need to break her boundaries—which she notices the most with Teaghan because she grew up across the street from her.
And I think that Teaghan is also very interested in breaking the patriarchal boundaries that she’s lived under all her life. She’s constantly wandering away. She’s deeply curious about anything she doesn’t know about. That includes Nicole because Nicole has been isolated from the rest of the community, so she just wants to know everything about her.
Audrey Bauman
There’s so much in this society that’s passed down. I’m thinking about all the times that Nicole says something like, “My mother taught me to act in this way if my husband is angry.” Or when she’s getting married, the wives all “train” her—they give her advice. I’m curious about the role of ritual and ceremony in the book and how they facilitate training or education in this world.
Laura Cranehill
I think that part of the ritual thing is the folk-horror roots of this novel. I was taking on a lot of folk-horror traditions and Gothic horror traditions and that sort of thing. A ritual is a shorthand way in a story to show how people mark the big moments in their lives, right? And part of the thing that I wanted to do with ritual is that I wanted to show how different the women’s rituals and the men’s rituals were, because I think that we sometimes have this idea that when there’s a culture that’s oppressive towards certain people, there’s only a monoculture present, but that’s not true. There’s plenty of subcultures. Even in a very oppressive and controlling culture, whenever there’s a great gender divide, a gathering of men might act much different than when a bunch of women gather, which is then much different from when there’s a mixed group. Believing that the women are all going to act in the same way, the way that they’re told to act, is just not true. Even though they’re under this extremely oppressive culture, they’re still finding meaning with each other, they’re still having fun, they’re still able to find connection and way of doing things together, separate from the men.
Audrey Bauman
Like when the women do the “pass the nut” game near the novel’s end, when they have to pass an object without touching each other.
Laura Cranehill
Yeah! It is another one of those rituals or games or something. Like, they’re going to have a lot of games—they don’t have TV, too, you know?—and just weird things that they do, especially when they’re trying to bend the rules by having this play around touching or not touching each other.
Audrey Bauman
I do want to ask you about genre. It’s tempting to think about ecohorror as a genre that happens “out there,” in natural landscapes. Whereas your book is so domestic! It’s about husbands and wives, mothers and daughters. What’s the connection, for you, between those domestic scenes and the ecologically horrifying?
Laura Cranehill
When it came to inspiration for these books, I turned to a lot of nature writing because I love nature, so it was a lot of Robert McFarland or Robin Wall Kimmerer and people who really revere nature. And I think that a large part of why we’re in such a bad place ecologically is this idea that nature and ourselves are separate, when it’s so far from the truth. We are such a part of nature. And even though we try desperately to isolate ourselves and say that nature exists over here and humans and cities exist over here, that’s never true. I live in deep Portland, and I just saw a coyote in the road! Nature is always existing with us, and we are nature.
I think that in the same way patriarchy, especially in the West, has really isolated especially people with wombs into the nuclear family. Enclosed domestic spaces are another method of isolation—how we exist so much in our own houses instead of being out with community and getting help from other people. I know a lot of us parents in particular feel like they’re drowning in these separate households that we’ve set up for ourselves. And I do think that relates to the isolation idea, the idea that we’re separate from nature.
Audrey Bauman
I love a novel that’s confined—we’re in one house, one town, one family—and I think it’s smart to tell a story with those constraints. It’s also very Gothic! I was curious: how did you develop the world of the story, and how especially did you incorporate your mushroom research into your setting?
Laura Cranehill
I feel like a lot of writers will come to a book because of a character or a scene or a setting or something like that, and for me—it’s the nerdiest thing—I just like science. I literally read so many mushroom books, and as I was studying these books, I was coming up with things in the world that would make sense for the science. So honestly, science came first. For instance, mushrooms are super queer. They don’t go by the gender binary at all. I feel like the big mascot for this is the split gill fungus which has, depending on who you ask, either over 23,000 genders or over 28,000 genders. And they can all mate with each other. They’re these beautiful examples of how other beings live and how nature is super queer. The world of the novel just naturally came together once I was studying these mushrooms.
So then it was like, “How do I weave real people and plot into this?” That was really the question. I fumbled around a lot. This is the first book that I’ve written and finished, and so I revised so much. The first draft that I wrote was so different from what the novel ended up being because I didn’t really understand how much could go into a book. I was like, “A novel is huge! I can write so much!” And then when it came down to it, I was like “Oh boy, I have like seven volumes of book in here. I need to cut it down.” I wish I could describe a way to streamline the process down for you, but it was not a streamlined process whatsoever.
Audrey Bauman
Midway through the novel is a richly described mushroom sex scene, which is another example of what you were talking about before with repulsion and beauty. How much of that scene came from the scientific research that you did and why was it important for you to include it? How were you trying to imagine queer reproduction in your book?
Laura Cranehill
I really wanted the mushroom sex for just fun reasons! But also, this is a book about domesticity, about parenthood and reproduction. I had to go through the reproductive cycle of a mushroom. A lot of the scene came from research. Some of it is fudged a little because the characters are human-ish, we can change it a little bit. But definitely a large part of it. The characters get in trouble for their sexual encounter because they’re only allowed to asexually reproduce. But while mushrooms can asexually reproduce; they can also sexually reproduce! And so, you know, that was the fun part. I do have to say, I realized that I found the right agent and editor because neither one of them even mentioned the phrase “shit moist” in the middle of a sex scene, you know what I mean? These are my people.
As for queer reproduction, that’s definitely a theme, especially in lesbian literature—women being able to reproduce without men, parthenogenesis. I don’t say this explicitly in the book, but I did think of my women as having mushroom genders. I felt that they were sort of moving past their humanity in general. They end up figuring out that they’re not really women, that the men have just confined them into these binary categories. But again, they’re mushrooms, which as we said earlier don’t conform to a binary system whatsoever. We’re just conditioned to think about gender in those terms. But they kind of do move past this idea of being women and further than that, they move past this idea of being human altogether. They’re a different kind of people.
Audrey Bauman
I love this idea of moving past even being human. I’m so interested in the end of the novel and (spoiler) the child that comes about because of Teagan and Nicole but also everyone and everything. It’s like Teagan and Nicole and the women come together and produce something that’s almost not of the same species as them.
Laura Cranehill
My idea was that it doesn’t really matter what species you are—we should come together and take care of all species. This child that gets created is such a multitude of species and still Nicole’s child. It’s this idea that not only are these women not human, they’re not even mushroom, they’re just caretakers of the world. This idea of wanting the child to make her home wherever she is, this idea that this is our home, that these are all the peoples living within us, that we need to all take care of each other—we’re all people and we’re all worthy of care and attention.
FICTION
Wife Shaped Bodies
By Laura Cranehill
S&S/Saga Press
Published April 14, 2026
