I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

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

I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.

I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

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.

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.