Sara Nelson asked Lily King:

While your book largely follows the life of Margaret Mead, you do take some liberties, particularly with the resolution of her relationships. . . Why did you make those decisions and has there been any reaction from readers (or the Margaret Mead estate, even?)

Lily King Hi Sara! Great question! When I first got the idea and started researching, I thought I would tell, as best I could from pretty limited sources, the story of what happened with Margaret Mead, her second husband Reo Fortune, and the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1933 in what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. But the by the end of the first page of the first draft of the book, I remembered I was a novelist, not a biographer or a historian and I had no interest in sticking to the facts. My only allegiance is to my characters and the story as it unfolds. And my characters very quickly became my own; they were not Mead or Fortune or Bateson. How could they be? I had never met them and only knew a limited amount of things about them. But to create fictional characters you have to know everything--or you have to give yourself the freedom to know whatever you need at any given moment to know. So I borrowed from my real-life inspirations, but I made up much, much more. I had to make up the rules as I went—I didn't know any books that had this model but I wasn't thinking about models or anything like that. I was just trying to write a book I would like to read. That's all I can ever do. That's what I stay loyal to. I have heard from Mead and Bateson's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, a gifted writer and anthropologist, and she has been wonderful and supportive. She is fully aware that I was not trying to capture the personalities or story of her parents. Sorry, long answer!

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