Deirdre, Carrick and I had breakfast with Claire and Mia Fontaine after their Good Morning America appearance this morning and confirmed in person what I'd already gleaned from reading Come Back and corresponding for a couple of weeks with Claire via email: It's uncanny how similar many of our experiences have been, and how sympatico we are.

During Charles Gibson's introduction to this morning's interview on GMA, a video and photo montage of young Mia splashed across the screen. Just like Carrick does in Saving Carrick — which incidentally will be rebroadcast on the NBC network's West Coast stations Wednesday evening (6/15) at 9 PDT — a young Mia dances and prances and sings and smiles as if she owns the world. Then come the teen years.

I'm a realist enough to realize that most TV interviewers skim the books they are discussing at best, but I thought Gibson came across as particularly shallow. He spent an inordinate amount of time wondering why Claire and Mia have changed their names — basically to protect themselves — and then asked Mia a question about cutting, which is not a major theme in Come Back. The theme of sexual abuse by Mia's biological father, however, was avoided altogether. In an interview like that, conducted with journalistic gravitas, it difficult to convey the ultimate message of the book, which is redemption and moving forward with compassion and humor.

Those qualities — compassion and humor — came to the surface as I listened to Carrick and Mia compare notes on their experiences and laugh together from the soul as they chatted away in an uptown diner. Carrick talked a little bit about the book she is "supposed to be" writing, and it was clear to me that a lot of it will be an attempt to put a story to some of the people she encountered — people who we often cross the street to avoid.

In Come Back, Claire writes about an epiphany she has when she realizes that the scary-looking runaways she's grilling while looking for Mia are all somebody's child. It's something I realized somewhere along the line, too. That's not to say there aren't dangerous people out there — incorrigibles and manipulating psychopaths who keep screwing people and would have you believe that they are the victims — but they are the exceptions. Unfortunately for Mia, she ran into one at an early age, but within minutes of meeting her, you know that this is a young woman, like Carrick, who will go as far as she wants to on native intelligence, empathy, and the wisdom she's gained.