Texting Olivia is a funny, fast-paced, modern take on the epistolary novel, using phone texts and calls instead of letters as the main form of communication.

Fay is a paralegal in her forties with thwarted career ambitions, which she blames on her mother. Indeed, she has done almost everything opposite to her own upbringing in raising Olivia. But Fay's assumptions about what it means to be a good mother-and also a good daughter-are put to the test when she and her husband take a madcap trip from New Jersey to San Francisco to help Olivia move out of her dorm.