I absolutely immersed myself in Euphoria - although the cover description wouldn't have made me pick it up. I read it for ELLE. I think having read Under the Wide and Starry Sky helped me immediately "get" Euphoria. Do you find any parallels in the novels? What inspired you to write about women who were so far ahead of their time? I can't imagine having boarded a boat back then, destined for islands unknown......

Lily King Hi Narci—Thanks so much. I haven't read Under the Wild and Starry Sky, but I will have to! I can't imagine doing that either. I am a terrible coward in comparison. I got the idea from Jane Howard's biography of Margaret Mead which I sort of read by accident in 2005. I got to the part when she was 31 in PNG with her second husband and fell in love with another man and they had this wild love triangle and I thought, wow that would make a good novel. But I really didn't think I would write that novel. I didn't think I could. But I started reading more about Mead and Bateson and found it all so compelling that I had to try. But, as I have said above, it turned very much into a work of fiction, because that is what I am trained in. That's what comes naturally to me.

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