'The only thing I look forward to are the weekends, and sometimes they suck just as much as the week. God, it's so damn boring! When I wake up in the morning, I feel like I'm 99 years old!! I'm so tired, lazy, and unhappy. I'm only 15, what's wrong with me? Why am I so unhappy? This world is so messed up! People are so messed up! I'm so messed up, or as my brother would say, "You're a freak!"'
 
What She Said takes its title from a Smiths song: "What she said was sad / But of course, all the rejection she's had / Pretending to be happy / Could just be stupid." The work originated from portraits Deanna Templeton took on the streets of the United States, Europe, Australia, and Russia, capturing women in their early teens: punks and outcasts whose ripped jeans and tights, tattoos, and hairstyles bear witness to this transitional time. in their lives as they navigated the intensity of teenage life. Templeton grew up in a seemingly different environment in the 1980s, but she recognized in them something of the universality of female adolescence, as they grappled with similar disappointments and challenges to those she encountered as a young woman. The book combines these modern portraits with concert flyers and entries from Templeton's own teenage diary from the mid-to-late 1980s, in which the familiar experience of growing up is laid bare in all its antagonism, humor, and pathos.