I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group.

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.