Erin Slaughter's father was murdered by his newlywed wife the night before Erin's senior year of high school began. In the years following, her family was fractured by cancer, alcoholism, and estrangement, and Erin entered her coming-of-age attempting to leave the trauma of the murder in her past (except when she joked about it inappropriately to new friends and on first dates), while secretly navigating her own struggles with addiction and mental illness. As she sought to understand her father's complicated past and how it led him to marry the woman who killed him, Erin became the collector of artifacts and retracer of family histories, redefining the "five stages of grief" for her own fragmented experience. Part true-crime story, part poetic meditation on seeking to know a parent posthumously, The Dead Dad Diaries confronts the impact of domestic violence and hereditary addiction on a family lineage, and questions the extent to which we can trust the stories we tell ourselves about our memories, our lives, and the people in them.