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Prudential Insurance Company of America, New York, New Jersey. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. For too many parents, it's a terrible and troubling question. How well do you know your children? And for too many parents, the answer can have life or death consequences as the final entry in one young girl's diary made all too clear.

Jim Axelrod will report our cover story. She was a 17-year-old high school junior with a golden future, straight A's, loving parents, and a bunch of friends. She was such a happy girl.

So motivated and so full of life. But there was another darker side to the story. I leaned over the embankment and looked down and I saw her. This doesn't happen to us. But it did happen.

Why these parents are sharing their heartbreak ahead on Sunday Morning. Whatever your political affiliation, Julia Louis-Dreyfus may be just about everyone's favorite vice president. Her show Veep is launching a new season.

Tracey Smith catches up with her. I am still a young woman. Really. Look at my hands. Gorgeous. Look at my neck. Okay.

In her final year on the hit HBO show, Julia Louis-Dreyfus had both the role of a lifetime and maybe the fight of her life. How are you going to say goodbye? Through tears and laughs. I don't know.

It's awful. Forget it. We're going to do another season. Behind the Scenes at Veep, later on Sunday morning. Our series now serving continues this morning with Martha Teichner's visit to America's Test Kitchen. If America's Test Kitchen says a particular skillet is tough, believe it. If a recipe appears in one of its cookbooks, know that it's been tested and tasted hundreds of times.

The mission really has been the same for 25 years, which is to empower home cooks to succeed in their own kitchens. Ahead this Sunday morning, we follow some carrots from peeler to page. Lee Cowan gives us a read on best-selling author Delia Owens. And on this St. Patrick's Day, we'll be hearing from the chorus of University College Dublin. And more, all coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Any life cut short is a tragedy, especially for parents who lose a child and never saw it coming.

Jim Axelrod has a cautionary tale from the final entry in a young girl's diary. Tonight was beautiful. It was a beautiful day. I saw the moon.

I saw the stars. The home video will look so familiar to so many parents. The sweet little girl singing and dancing her way to her teen years, where she's recognized for achieving outside the home.

Please consider me for the National Honor Society. And thoroughly cherished inside it. Like, this was awesome, Alexandra. She was such a happy girl. Happy birthday to you.

And so motivated and so just full of life. But familiar will turn to terrifying when parents hear the whole story. Of Alexandra Velouris. Just weeks after a family ski vacation, give a smile, this 17-year-old high school junior, straight-A student, class officer, and robotics whiz, made her bed, tidied her room, and walked to a highway overpass in Grafton, Massachusetts. I leaned over the embankment and looked down and I saw her.

Dean Velouris, Alexandra's father. I was just hoping for warmth. Do you know what I mean? But there was no warmth that was done. Then all the cars kept driving by. My daughter's on the side of the road.

Nobody saw this. And she's cold. Nearby, Dean and his wife, Alicia, found two journals in their daughter's belongings. Her final entry was written just hours before her death. The ghost of you.

While listening to a playlist, she entitled, Goodbye. I'm inside out. You're underneath. Don't let me become.

I think we had this one open when we were at the bridge. And it was just like phrases and words, and I'm not good enough. I'm worthless. I'm like, these are things that we've never heard.

There was just so much joy in everything she did. And it doesn't match what was in that journal. 200 pages of self-loathing and despair, written in Alexandra's own hand. You are broken. You are a burden. You are lazy.

You are a failure. She was a highly motivated achiever. But that's how she felt inside. Such a sharp and confusing contrast to who they thought was their happy oldest child, strumming her way through adolescence and still talking to her parents. You're having all these great conversations. Great conversations.

It just doesn't seem possible, but it's what reality was because it's written right here. With teen suicide at a 40-year high for young women Alexandra's age, and now the second leading cause of death for 15 to 24-year-olds of both sexes, it is this disconnect that most haunts Dean and Alicia Velouris. The girl who seemed to love it when her parents took her to a concert by the Scottish rock group Biffy Clyro went home and wrote, I hated it. I just wanted to be alone.

I have built a robotic tank. Two weeks before she died on March 19, 2018, Alexandra's robotic team won regionals and a place in the international finals. I mean, we were there that day. She was so excited, but none of that made the journal. Instead, the next entry, I need an excuse as to why I'm doing poorly. She was able to obscure this feeling of despair.

But there's, you know, there's hints, but I'm not thinking this. The journals were a complete shock to her English teacher, Tim Freitas. Her intellect, her candle power. Where does that rank out of nine years worth of high school kids? Number one and number two. Absolutely. That's smart. Oh, yeah.

What does that machine do? Alexandra had confided in him that she was having a hard time staying motivated. But Freitas chalked it up to teenage angst. It's always playing back. How would you do things differently now that the outcome has been seen?

You still wrestling with that? Of course. How do I go forward and have kids sit right in front of me and I don't have a clue what's going on in their personal lives, but still trying to figure out if there's something going on? I think we all carry a little guilt because we all thought we knew her so well. Her friends are also haunted. Molly Turner and Zoe Mahoney were two of Alexandra's closest friends at Blackstone Valley Technical High School.

They were an engineering shop together. I just want to read this thing to you, OK? A hangout with my shop is someplace I can let my guard down a bit more.

I shouldn't do this, really. I'm pretty sure they've noticed by now I've been out of it for a while, but I don't want to concern them. When you hear that now, does it make you at all happy to know that was a safe place for her or something else? It's like I feel so happy that she was able to let her guard down, but I feel like she shouldn't have had to have a guard up at all at any time. Did you notice she was, in her words, out of it? Well, I think we noticed that she was a little more stressed than usual, but with junior year, like, everyone's stressed.

It's normal to stress. I have more kids who are cutting, who are attempting suicide, who are entering inpatient psychiatric facilities, students who in the past would have been considered the sort of model students. Many of Scott White's 40 years as a guidance counselor were spent in affluent New Jersey communities full of high-achieving kids. In your view, is the spike we're seeing in teen suicide related to this, what you call an unhealthy culture? Absolutely. We have a culture that makes kids think that if they're not perfect, they're less than good.

Alexandra's journal, it begins with a checklist. What will get me into MIT? Valedictorian, first robotics captain, 100 plus hour service award, Model UN, attend both conferences, win. Is there something wrong with these goals? There's no balance on these goals. There's no check as to not every person can reach them. Whether that child can reach them, it's sort of unknown, but if she did, there would be another goal beyond that.

You know that and I know that. For Alexandra, nothing was good enough. There was no pressure that you have to get into the school, you have to do this. She put that pressure on herself.

I don't want this notebook to end. I love it more than myself, she wrote. I need a place where there is no need for me to be perfect. What Alexandra was drifting towards, as you read through the journal, is a place of unhealthy thinking and I would probably wager that there's some type of mental diagnosis that could have been done. Which is why the valorises are taking the crippling pain public that most keep private, headlining suicide prevention walks, visiting schools to share Alexandra's story. The hurt, the sadness is evolving and now there's this thing called living. So then I'm a good father, good husband and a good person. They hope that in sharing the story of their daughter, maybe another family will be spared this trauma.

What will I miss by dying tonight? The possibility of getting better. There's a lot of other kids out there that are like her, that are high achievers, that are balancing a lot. That's what makes her very relatable and why maybe it's affecting people and why they're listening is because I have a child like this too. And in the pain of what Alex wrote to her parents in her final entry hours before she took her life. Don't blame yourselves for not seeing warning signs is also what the Valoris family hopes to salvage from her death. Some meaning for others. Last summer, the morning after an interview was published, they found this note on their doorstep. What Hugh have said in Alexandra's article truly changed my life, knowing that families are talking to their kids about their mental health. It lets me know that she didn't die in vain.

She's having such a huge impact and that feels really good. But come ye back when summer's in the meadow. Or when the valley's harsh and white with snow. Tis I'll be here in sunshine and in shadow. Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so. Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

Marking this St. Patrick's Day with the choral scholars of University College Dublin. So what is the perfect recipe for preparing a hard boiled egg? Now serving an inside look at the show that answers nearly all your culinary questions.

Our server is Martha Teichner. A whole year before publication, America's Test Kitchen was fine tuning a contender for its newest cookbook at its headquarters in Boston, a recipe for roasted carrots and shallots. Is it salty enough, not too salty? Day one of testing was about experimentation. There's a sweetness with eggs, a natural carroty sweetness, where B tastes a bit more flat. On day two, the test chefs made adjustments. I'm going to try roasting the carrots less. And try it again. This one turned out really nice.

Their conclusion, medium sized carrots, any kind, cooked in butter at 450 degrees. End of story? Thanks guys. Not in this busy place.

On any given day, a television show is likely being shot. A dozen or more recipes are being developed in the test kitchen. For flavor I like number five, nice and sweet. Food stylists tidy up plates for photographers. I like that angle.

The pictures for a future cookbook, a magazine, or one of America's Test Kitchen's websites. So you're the hand model? I am. Do you take special care of your hands? Yeah, I mean, I'll get a phone call once in a while. Do you mind just going to get a manicure?

Are you kidding? Does that cake look good enough to eat? What's left is headed for the take home fridge, an irresistible perk for ATK's growing staff, who now number almost 200. In 2017, the expanding edible empire moved to this 55,000 square foot space along Boston's waterfront.

So we have the two television shows, our two magazines, about 15 books a year, and then our websites. Chief creative officer Jack Bishop, like a lot of ATK's experts, is a regular on the TV shows. What makes a great fish sauce? More protein.

Dispensing the often surprising results of ATK research. Searing meat does not seal in juices. You do not need to sift flour. You should be steaming your eggs rather than boiling them.

We have about 5,000 books. Bishop co-founded the company in 1993. The mission really has been the same for 25 years, which is to empower home cooks to succeed in their own kitchens. I tell you, once you know how to cook salmon this way, it's a game changer. It was and is the opposite of slick. America's test kitchen. The first host of ATK's TV shows wasn't some flashy celebrity chef. We spend most of our time eating bad food. It was nerdy New Englander Christopher Kimball.

A little dry. This was not an obvious blueprint for the huge success ATK has had. Garlic breath is actually a very real phenomenon. Especially since the company didn't then and doesn't now accept any advertising. The one problem is the handles get really hot over a gas flame. In addition to the recipes, the review content is a very important part of the mission at America's Test Kitchen.

And that's difficult to do if you are also accepting advertisements from the same companies that you're then reviewing. Five hundred. Lisa McManus gets paid. All right, here we go. Sorry, little pan. To abuse stuff.

Still on for now. We'll see. It was very warped.

In this case, skillets. Wow. Okay. Bad.

In order to figure out which ones. Warped. Still warped. Are tough enough to take it. Getting there. Just think of the job satisfaction. You know, we always try to find out why did the winners win and the losers lose. We don't just say take our word for it. We want to prove why. As executive tasting and testing editor.

How's that for a title? Her rigor is part of the reason people trust ATK product recommendations. Today I've got some of the worst gadgets of the year. Trust is the reason ATK's cooking shows reach more than four million viewers. We tested a lot of ways to heat up the skillet. We found the oven worked best. Our whole business is cooking things the wrong way so that we can eventually find the right way.

Bridget Lancaster and Julia Collin Davison, two longtime test chefs, host the TV shows now. After you've washed your parsley, you put it back into a bundle. You take your knife and you just start shaving it.

Just like this on the outside. They come across like skilled stand-ins for their viewers. God, that's so easy.

Who truly eat up their advice. That's such a great technique. I learned.

Wow. Which brings us back to that carrot and shallot recipe. We sent it out to be road tested by volunteer home cooks. And if we don't get 80% of the people to say, yes, I want to make that recipe again, it goes back into our test kitchen and gets reworked. About 90% of my kitchen equipment is based upon their recommendations. Stephanie Patterson of Worcester, Ohio, is one of 17,000 volunteer home cooks who signed up on the website to test recipes. Currently in my email there's four new ones to test. And how long have you done this?

Nine years. Carol Criss of Holmdel, New Jersey, is another. It's almost like there's too many recipes in too little time. To say they're groupies is an understatement. I'm on their Facebook group and on Instagram there's a lot of people. So it's like a club. Yeah, it's definitely a club.

For Patterson, who has muscular dystrophy, it's actually more. It's a world. And I feel like I'm helping them make the recipe as good as it can be before they print it. And it makes you part of their family. Exactly, yes, yeah. So did they like the carrots and shallots? High marks, high, high marks. The shallots are sensational. The recipe made the cut. It's on page 86 of America's Test Kitchen's just released Vegetables Cookbook.

That's very good. Steve Hartman this morning has a story that gives new meaning to the expression, in the long run. No one wants to feel like old news, like their glory days are gone. But Ernie Andrus says that's exactly how he felt in the months after his celebrated, record-breaking run. Back in 2016, then 93-year-old Ernie Andrus became the oldest person ever to run across America.

From San Diego, California, all the way to St. Simons Island, Georgia. A huge crowd joined him at the end as this World War II sailor stormed the beach one last time to fervent chants and flying colors. It was pure joy. That all happened about two and a half years ago. Today, Ernie still runs for exercise and still dreams of the glory.

I was running three days a week, but it's the same old thing. And I just got a little bored. He recently got so restless, he decided to do something remarkable.

And I don't use that word lightly. If he pulls this off, this would be truly remarkable. Yesterday, at the age of 95, Ernie returned to the Georgia beach where his run ended to start a new run back across the country again. We ask you to bless Ernie this day as he begins this journey in earnest. His last trip took three years, but now his run is more like a mosey. So Ernie expects this one to take a bit longer. He hopes to reach San Diego sometime after his 100th birthday. The man is nothing if not an optimist. I've got all the runs planned clear up to 2025. So you plan to get there one way or the other?

Wheelchair, gurney, whatever it takes. It's just not in a coffin. Just like last time, Ernie is dedicating his run to the LST. That's a kind of ship, the same kind of ship Ernie served on in the war. There's one left, and it's open for tours in Evansville, Indiana.

He's running to raise money and awareness. This shouldn't be forgotten. A ship is like a person to you. We call it the gray lady. Sounds like you're in love with this lady. Oh yeah, it's part of my soul.

Honoring his naval past by plodding toward the Pacific. And in his wake, Ernie Andress leaves behind all the proof you'll ever need. That there's no fun in fading into the sunset.

At least, not when you can run into it. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was laugh-out-loud funny as Elaine in the classic sitcom Seinfeld. And she struck comedy gold again, this time mining the world of Washington politics. Here's Tracey Smith. Why do I have to tell people why I want to be president?

I mean, I don't want to hear about their jobs. If only politicians were really this funny. In HBO's Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Selina Meyer, a one-time Veep, an accidental president, and a full-time queen of disaster.

I'd like to begin today. Her character is a narcissistic train wreck, a politician who's both a bad winner. Anything you want, I'm at your beck and call. Thank you so much, Senator Suckup.

And a poor loser. Nevada is my state. I'm going to be president. I'm going to be the first elected lady president. I'm going to have a lovely inauguration.

Billy Joel is going to sing. And now, in her seventh and final season, Dreyfus says it could be her best role ever. For me, it's the role of a lifetime. I really do feel that way. And you've had some really good roles. Yeah, exactly. I really have.

But I feel like this is sort of unsurpassed for me in many ways. Were you on top of this, or what? Well, we were busy writing youth culture references and a funny song about the speaker. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In Selina's world, nothing is sacred. No insult is left unsaid. Military industrial complex.

These are the president's flying monkeys. And she's pretty high maintenance. Tony Hale is her faithful assistant, Gary.

For the perfect moment in the perfect life of a perfect woman. This is like Kathy Bates in Misery. Describe Gary's feelings for Selina. He worships her. She is his Jesus. She's an awful person, but to him, it's just the second coming.

Take all these meaningless syllables with you and just get out. Yes, absolutely, ma'am. The show's real whipping boy is Jonah Ryan, played by Timothy Simons. Jonah's a bumbling aide who eventually runs for president himself. I just want to make it clear that she does do all the housework. Thank you.

It's been incredibly fun to play Jonah. It is kind of hard to be this dumb all the time. It takes some smarts to be this dumb. It does. Thank you.

Thank you. We are so screwed. Like so many great American TV shows, Veep has British roots. It's derived from a UK political comedy called The Thick of It. In the time it has taken for Terry to extract herself from her Bluetooth, this little inquiry has fused.

It is now growing faster than the speed of bloody light. Of course, total meltdowns are funny over here, too. You have made it impossible to do this job.

You have two settings, no decision and bad decision. Selina's fed-up chief of staff is played by Anna Klumsky. So many people, like a lot of young women especially, will come up to me and be like, you're me. And I'm like, oh, God, I'm so scared. Here you are running America.

You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery. Do the same pickup one more time. Veteran showrunner David Mandel knows how to bring out the best of the Veep cast, especially Julia. He worked with her back in the 90s as a writer on another hit show. Gillian, hi.

It's very nice to meet you. Yeah, this one. Remember the Man Hands episode? David Mandel wrote it. She had man hands. Man hands?

The hands of a man. For Veep, the standards are just as high. Mandel and cast shoot the same scene again and again, adjusting the timing and punchlines and facial expressions until it all just works. It all sounds stupid, but I mean, we would crawl through glass to get an extra laugh into the scene. My favorite thing is when people say, I was watching and I had to stop and go back because there's so much in there. I was laughing and didn't hear the next two lines.

And that's, I mean, that's all I care about. Are there moments where offstage you're trying not to laugh out loud? Oh, God, if you're watching me at the monitor, when we're lucky, I'm somewhere where I can laugh.

So that's number one. If we're far enough away, I will laugh. You can't help it. And also, I am a laugher, I guess. I sort of subscribe to sort of the happy parts of comedy.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I can be as miserable as the next guy, but when I hear a joke, I like to laugh. But I will cover my head sometimes. I will bite my fingers, especially sometimes I'm on the set behind the camera sort of throwing different lines and stuff in, and I so worry about I'm here, I don't want to make any noise, and I'm sort of like, you know, and trying not to look at them, because now I'm really close to, like, actually seeing what, like, a face Tony's making. I mean, I don't know how, you know, sometimes how Julia even handles it with that close to Tony. With Tony with those faces. Oh, my gosh. So are you ready for these buzz cut bozos? What are you talking about? I'm used to dealing with angry, aggressive, dysfunctional men, i.e.

men. And now, just as with Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is leaving her audience wanting more. You've said goodbye to shows before, and, you know, you tend to say goodbye to shows when they're up here. Yeah. Is this different, this one?

I don't know, because I haven't said goodbye goodbye yet, but I will say that at our final table read that we had, I was actually surprised by how, frankly, hysterical I became, and maybe that's because, I don't know, I'm more cognizant of what a treasure this is, just because I'm older and I've been doing this a while, and I'm sort of aware of when it's good. It's a very lucky thing. Yeah. And the Emmy goes to Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

What? And it seems lucky is the operative word. In 2017, Dreyfus won a record sixth consecutive Emmy for Veep. No one could tell, as she accepted her statuette, that she was waiting to hear whether or not she had cancer. It was so strange because that Sunday night, we won the Emmy. She won, we won, it was fun. We were at the party, we were at the after party. She was there at the after party. She knew she most likely had it. She was, I think, 90% sure.

We didn't know. She knew she was at the after party. She learned her diagnosis the next day, and not long after that, she told the world, with a note on social media saying, one in eight women get breast cancer.

Today, I'm the one. God, at that point, it's like, forget about any of the show. What's going to happen to her?

Truth is, not even she knew that. But even when she began chemotherapy, it didn't stop her from showing up to work. Yeah, it's funny because I'm so, yes, it has been a tremendous gift to come back to this. And frankly, even when I was going through my chemotherapy that I had, I did come back here every three weeks and we did table reads and stuff, just so that we kept the machine operating and took it as an opportunity to sort of get scripts written in advance.

And that was, in so many ways, very buoying. It was hard to do because, particularly towards the end, I was pretty sort of strung out. I mean, you were sick, right? And you're still doing the table reads?

Yeah, still doing the table reads, but nothing beyond that, I will say. I mean, then I had to really sort of hunker down and just focus on getting better, which I did. But then coming back to this, you know, it's sweeter than ever because, I don't know, it's a great gift to be able to do what you love. Not everybody gets to say that, you know, and I really love doing this. I'm not sure about this part where I say I want to be president for all Americans. I mean, do I, you know?

All? And now, a year and a half later, she says she's cancer-free. I mean, it sounds so trite, but did it add to appreciating things? Well, it certainly added to appreciating life. Life doesn't go on forever, and so that sort of, you know, came right up to my face as a reminder. And so, yeah, I think I have kind of a pretty solid sense of priority, shall we say, moving forward now.

The level of incompetence in this office is staggering. And moving forward is bittersweet. The cast members that seem to hate each other on screen genuinely admire, you could even say love each other in real life. What do you think you're going to miss the most? I guess that, yeah, the relationships.

When you spend 20 hours a day with people, you know, you see them at their best and their worst, and at this point you just realize how much they matter to you. It's okay. Damn it. Sorry, it's the morning.

Good morning. If there's a takeaway from Veep's long run, maybe it's this. In comedy, as in life, nothing good ever comes easy.

How long is this fight? We squeeze as much money out of it as we possibly can. And can that be torturous at times? Yes, it can be. I know this is CBS, so I can't swear. We can beep you.

You can beep me. It can be fucking awful. But once you've walked through the awful to find your way to the right moment, the right language, the right emotion, and you land it, it's like chocolate cake for days. Yeah.

This week's New York Times bestseller list is out, and once again at number one, Where the Crawdads Sing, from author Delia Owens. Just how the novel came to be is a story in itself, as Lee Cowan explains. It's almost in Canada with a view of Montana. That's just how remote this northern corner of Idaho really is. It's worlds away from almost everything, except nature. This is really special.

See these little otter prints? For Delia Owens, it's heaven. Wildlife is her church, vast isolation her muse. Do you get lonely out here? I do. I get so lonely sometimes I feel like I can't breathe.

That's lonely. Do you like a part of that story? I do, I do. And I decided to write a book about it.

Please welcome Delia Owens. That book, Where the Crawdads Sing, has become a phenomenon. It still haunts me. It was so beautifully written. At a recent book fair in Savannah, Georgia, she had readers lined up around the block just to meet her. It's so many stories wrapped up into one. I couldn't put it down. The book has become a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list over the last six months.

On the day we visited, Putnam, her publisher, gave her a call to tell her she'd just made it to number one for the third week in a row. Oh, thank you. You guys just are so amazing. They keep sending me champagne. One thing about the success is I have learned how to open a bottle of champagne by myself.

They keep coming. What makes her success all the more remarkable is that Owens, now 70, has never written a novel before. I have had such a great response from my readers.

I just feel overwhelmed with gratitude. The book is pretty tough to categorize. It's a love story, a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an ode to the outdoors all in one. Old copies of the manuscript, which would be hilarious to read. It took her the better part of a decade to write. Inspiration coming whenever it came. I sleep at night with a little pad of paper in my bed with a flashlight and a pen. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and write something down. Something that I think is brilliant.

Then when I wake up in the morning, I'll look at them. Half the time I can't read what I wrote. Now the long-awaited...nope. I can't read it.

Nope. A thousand such moments became little scraps of gold. Sand keeps secrets much better than mud.

That one made it to the book. Sand keeps secrets much better than the mud. See, that's a great line.

That line would have never occurred to me in a million years. The title, Where the Crawdads Sing, was taken from a phrase her mother used to use, encouraging her tomboy of a daughter to take to the woods around their rural Georgia home and listen to what those woods had to say. I learned from a book that crawdads don't really sing. But I learned from my mother that if you go far enough into the wilderness by yourself and there's nothing but you and nature, you will hear the crawdads sing. She took that advice to heart, earning a BS in zoology and a PhD in animal behavior. And at 24, bought a one-way ticket to Africa to put her science background to work. With her then-husband, Mark Owens, they made a name for themselves in the wild, writing three books together about their experiences with elephants and lions.

Tooth eruption and wear help the Owens determine a lion's age. Even appearing in this National Geographic documentary. We've got company here, so they're bound to come over here now. We were in one stage, the only two people in an area the size of Ireland. You never saw anybody?

No, not unless people came to our camp, and that was very, very rare. The two have since divorced, but Owens kept on writing. What she wanted to explore was something she felt all those years in Africa but couldn't really measure, at least not in a scientific way. And that was her feeling of being alone. I would watch the lions in the late afternoon with the sun setting behind the dunes, and they'd be playing and tumbling with their cubs and each other's cubs, and it made me think about my girlfriends back home. It made me realize how isolated I was not to have a group.

And that was one thing I wanted to write about in my novel was the effect that isolation and loneliness can have on a person. The seed for her first novel was planted. She chose as a setting a lonely place indeed, a marsh like the one she took us to, just off the coast of Savannah. This would be just the kind of channel that she would come through. Her protagonist is a girl named Kaia.

It's not too bad. The marsh girl, as she's known in town, forced to scratch out a life out here all by herself. This is just the sort of habitat she would be in. After her family abandoned her. I feel like we should see her coming.

Yes. Because you do talk about her like she's real. She is real.

She's very real to me. For Kaia, this was her world, the wild her teacher, both in love and loss. Much the way Owens herself had found her way through life. I feel at home when I'm in a place like this. You can put me in the middle of a desert or the middle of mountains.

When I'm out, away from everything else, I feel like I'm home. Perhaps that's why writing fits her so. After all, it's a pretty solitary pursuit. But being a successful writer, well, that's anything but. Is it hard doing a book tour and all that other stuff where you're surrounded by so many people and you've got so many events and book signings and everything. It's very hard. I don't like that part. And to stand up in front of a crowd and talk. I've lived a remote life.

I'm not used to seeing so many people in one place. And although I'm sure you're very nice, the feeling of excitement that I get right now is sort of the same as being charged by a lioness. She certainly can't put the genie back in the bottle. She's even sold the rights for an upcoming movie. Reese Witherspoon is producing.

Hollywood, though, is a different animal than she's used to. Woohoo, boys! Come on, boys! Come on, boys!

Delia Owens remains a nature girl at heart. Happiest way out yonder, just like her mother always said. OK, you've earned your dinner. Come on, boys.

This is where the crawdads sing, right here. This is it. I finally found it. It took a lifetime.

Yeah. I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And please join us again next Sunday morning. From the newest interior design trend, Barbie Corps, to the right and wrong way to wash your armpits. Also, we're going to get into things that you just kind of won't believe and we're not able to do in daytime television, so watch out. Listen to Drew's News wherever you get your podcasts. It's your good news on the go.