I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

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

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.