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.

It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes.

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.

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

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

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.

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!