“How do you help someone with a problem?” I ask. “A problem they don’t think they have.”

Kat Greene lives in New York City and attends fifth grade in the very progressive Village Humanity School. At the moment she has three major problems—dealing with her boy-crazy best friend, partnering with the overzealous Sam in the class production of Harriet the Spy, and coping with her mother’s preoccupation with cleanliness, a symptom of her worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Melissa is a former advice columnist for Just Seventeen magazine in London, where she answered hundreds of letters from readers each week. (Her column was called “Life Sucks,” but it was Melissa’s job to insist it didn’t.) Kat Greene Comes Clean is her debut novel. Melissa lives in New York City.