Chasing the Mockingbird is the story of a journalist’s collapse into mental illness while doing research for a book about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Bouler had a life-long fascination with Ms. Lee’s novel because she grew up 40 miles from the famous author’s hometown of Monroeville in south Alabama. Ms. Lee knew Jean’s parents.Years later, Jean’s interest in Ms. Lee turned into an obsession with tracing her path to fame. On a (literally) manic romp to New York, in the archives of the public library, she read notes Ms. Lee had written while helping Truman Capote research In Cold Blood. Traveling to Monroeville she got locked in the famed courthouse. Jean spent weeks of frantic calls and faxes to set up a phone call with Gregory Peck, who rarely granted interviews, about his most-loved part as Atticus. When this project had brought her to a point of near exhaustion, her schizophrenic brother, in a mental institution’s halfway house, was diagnosed with lung cancer at 48. Jean desperately tried to find a place for him to die in peace. She succeeded, but at a terrible price. As he gasped his last breath it was as though he had put his hand on her arm and said, “It’s your turn to be crazy now.” Madness quietly took Jean into his world of delusions and paranoia.She plunged into depression then soared into mania. She landed on a locked ward facing her own commitment hearing. Antipsychotic drugs pulled Jean back to reality – twice.