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.

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

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

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.