Erin Garven is a teenager who desperately wants to connect to her mother who died when she was three days old. The only connection Erin has to her mother is a worn paperback book of To Kill a Mockingbird. The day before her sixteenth birthday, Erin’s father gives her the diary her mother had kept at sixteen. Upon reading a few pages, Erin realizes that she and her mother have a lot in common. Both wanted to become writers. She also discovers that her mother once wrote to Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.