India, Jan. 3 -- 1Both The Anthropologists and Long Distance are preoccupied with observation. What draws you to the idea of perception as both connection and distance? I think, for many writers, one of the reasons they become writers in the first place is that they were observers as children. I also have this theory that many of us who were shy spent a lot of our childhood on the periphery, watching others closely, deeply curious about what people were doing, but not quite able to jump in and be part of the action. And of course, we spent a lot of that time reading. That is another way to become a writer, by being immersed in fictional landscapes to the point where you feel you're the hero yourself. I think my childhood upbringing carries over to the types of characters I write, because that's how I have been in the world, always observing others and having a different world going on inside my own head. 2The Anthropologists follows a narrator who returns home and studies her surroundings as if she were conducting fieldwork. How did that idea begin for you? I wanted to write a book about daily life, but it can feel too boring. I couldn't just describe what people eat for breakfast, or what they do when they spend time with friends. I needed some kind of structure that would signal to the reader: this is a book about daily life. Daily life is deeply important, and it's something we often overlook in favour of bigger or more dramatic stories. The anthropological lens became useful because anthropology is, at its core, a way of looking closely at how people live. It is a study that breaks down habits, routines and behaviours through a particular framework. 3The book feels like it's asking if we can ever truly see others without turning them into objects of study. Were you consciously engaging with the ethics of looking across different cultures? More than the ethics of looking, I was engaged with the ethics of belonging, and what gives us a right to ownership of a place. If we're not native to a place, can we ever really say that we belong there? And if we don't quite belong, then what is it that makes our lives valuable, especially when such a large portion of the world now lives as foreigners? We have to find new ways of engaging fully with the places we inhabit, without pretending to have deep knowledge of them - while still respecting the fact that our lives are valuable, and that we have a right to be where we are. 4Your prose is very pared- down... The pared-down prose is something that happens over many, many revisions. When I'm editing, I try to take out everything that's not essential. I try to describe the feelings in the cleanest, simplest terms available to me. That is essential to me as an author because often you don't really know what you're writing until you've started. As you go, you discover your own thoughts. That discovery process for me lies in making things sparser and sparser....