What exactly is Delia Owens saying in her best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing? Perplexing events and characters in the story have caused readers to ask a lot of questions and have a lot of interpretations. Last November, I was fortunate to hear Owens speak in person about the novel, offering a few answers to all those questions.

Inspiration for the story, she explained, started when she was a child in the state of Georgia and her mother would send her out to explore the woods. As an adult, while she was exploring the much larger wilds of Africa, she realized how similar human behavior is to animal behavior. “We are both territorial,” she said. “Also, females will abandon their young in times of severe stress.”