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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.

Lily King

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Lily King
Age: 54
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
the United States of America
Mass
Saying
Mead
Reading
Margaret
Understand
Anthropology
Everything
Separated
Something
Bothered
Way
Grandmother
Always
Wrote

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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.
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I've also done things that put me in odd situations.
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Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
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To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.
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I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.
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I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.
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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!
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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.
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There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.
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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.
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I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.
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I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.
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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.
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I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.
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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.
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