Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.

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.

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

I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

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