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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.