In 2020, just before the pandemic hit, I embarked on a project that would ultimately change my life. I contacted dozens of women who had attended middle and high school with me — friends who had iced me out, friends who warmly welcomed me afterwards, acquaintances, “cool” girls, outcasts, “brains,” and bullies — and asked them to talk with me about their memories of the social milieu we inhabited during the 1970s. Forty years after the bullying I experienced in middle school, I still carried...