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.

When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

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

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.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.

Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.

I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.