her 1933 expedition to New Guinea Photo: Keystone France
In an interview with Humanities Tennessee, Lily King was asked “What were the aspects of
their lives in the field that surprised you most?” Her answer:
“I was truly surprised by their colonial attitudes. Mead and Fortune had 250
porters carrying their stuff up the Torricelli Mountains in 1931 – at least a four-day
climb. They would arrange fora cook boy, a shoot boy, a houseboy right off. Just those
acts alone would affect your reception and role in the village, would skew your results
even before you asked your first question. What I also found interesting was
how emotional it all was. As a novelist I deal in emotions, but I think of scientists as
being able to cut off extremes of feeling when necessary to get the job done. But the
five months those three spent together on the Sepik River were driven by emotion.”
In an interview with GUERNICA / A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics, Lily King was asked
the question – “What is something you loved learning but could not include in the book?”
Her answer:
“There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is
a delicacy. I wanted to have a ceremony where they would eat raw bat. And then there’s
another one where these butterflies come flying over the river, and they catch them
and eatthem all up. Fried butterfly.”
“I read this scene in Mead’s memoir. She writes about how they (Mead, her husband, Reo
Fortune, and Bateson) went swimming and how Bateson just stripped down, assuming
they were going skinny dipping. Fortune was horrified. He got angry at Bateson for
taking liberties
in front of his wife. I put that in the novel and my agent said, “There’s just one scene that
doesn’t work for me. I don’t think the character would do this,” and it was that scene. But I kept
it in because I thought, this really happened! Then my editor read it and said this scene
doesn’t work. “
What aspects of the book work for you or do not work?
Come share your thoughts and join the discussion on January 5.