Kathleen: I have been a teacher for twenty years in Minneapolis, all at elite suburban schools and independent schools. I've thought a lot about parenting in my life. This scenario did not happen to me. However, my oldest son, who's a tenth grader now but was a sixth grader when I started writing this book, tried out for a musical called Ellis Island, which is the same musical in the novel. As he was trying out, I was very excited and wanted him to get a part. I definitely had to check my Julia Abbott impulses during that process. I thought, oh, I'll just go down and ask the drama teacher how that read-through went or see if he remembered his choreography. Every time, I was like, that would be a bad idea. That would be crossing a line. The day that the cast list came out for the sixth grade Ellis Island that my son had tried out for, my teaching neighbor asked me, "Are you going to go down and look at it and see if he was cast?" Once again, we laughed about this. It seemed like it might just be harmless, but we both knew that it would be crossing a line. Then we had a fun time imagining all the moms that would do it, would come into the school and push the kids aside and look at the list. That's what Julia Abbott does at the beginning of the book. That was the first scene that came to me for this novel.