Kate: I started writing it when I was a teenager. What drew me to this story then, though it took a very different form back then, but that was around the age I started to become aware of how teenage girls were sexualized in our culture. That was confusing, being a teenage girl myself. Writing fiction was my way of making sense of that. That was sort of the seed of it, how it started. Then over the years, draft after draft has evolved. I had a real breakthrough around my thirtieth birthday which coincided with starting a PhD program in creative writing. It was then that I figured out this present-day plot line of another student coming forward and accusing that teacher. Once I figured out that plot line, it gave me the answer to this question of, why tell this story now and what is propelling this story forward? It gave the whole narrative a sort of urgency. Then after that, Me Too started to happen, which is I guess a whole other conversation. That was one of the most surreal things about the writing process, was arriving at this plot line and then seeing something really similar play out in the real world at the same time.