Judith: And Then They Stopped Talking to Me is about making sense of middle school, as the subtitle says. I quote it only because it really does sum it up so well. I can do it without seeming conceited because it was a friend of mine who came up with that wording rather than me. She said it to me because we had the title and we were just struggling and struggling to have a good subtitle. She said, "I've been listening to you all these years when you were caught up in making sense of it all." I literally said to her, "I got to go. I got to write that down." It was so perfect because there's so much to make sense of in so many different ways. Many of us are haunted by our own middle school memories, or junior high for people who are older and went to junior high school. In some parts of the country, they just still use the name junior high school. Our memories from that time are so powerful. They tend to be so strong. For most people, though not all, they tend to be really, really painful. Often, people hold onto what happened to them at that time as almost determinative of what happened later or who they became. That really fascinated me. That was the piece that fascinated me for decades, way before I was a mother.