Twenty-four-year-old elementary school teacher Annie Harper is left behind in Tacoma, Washington, when her boyfriend David, an Army lieutenant, is deployed to Baghdad. Struggling with an overwhelming sense of loss, she begins writing a memoir, imagining it as a moving account of a military spouse and possibly a bestseller the President himself will one day read. Instead, Annie's life goes on without David. She spends more time with her best friend Gus, begins volunteering, and adopts a pet chicken. Even as she misses David between his sparse emails, she struggles with conflicted feelings about their long-distance relationship, her own identity and family history, and the ideological underpinnings of the war that has taken her boyfriend so far away.