Coming in Spring 2027!
The choices we make.
The people we make them with.
The Grease Pencil Gang hasn’t seen each other in forty years. Then Dougie, their beloved high school journalism teacher, summons the group of five to his deathbed. Trish, who became a reporter because of her mentor, is now mired in academia in Philadelphia and locked in an argument with her partner, Julia, about their future. So she impulsively jumps at the chance to reconnect with her high school friends and relive a mystical time when all their dreams seemed within reach.
Reunited in suburban Dallas, the friends uncover a decades-old mystery that is tormenting their teacher. And Trish, whose unrequited feelings for one of the friends helped splinter the gang and launch decades of dead-end relationships for herself, is torn between her past and present.
Desperate for closure before he dies, Dougie makes a huge ask of Trish— one that will upend her life and steer it in a direction she never expected. The Next Right Thing is about the choices that confront us throughout our lives and our struggle to choose wisely.
The days of one foot in the closet.
As with The Salt and Light Express, there is a kernel of real life behind this novel. Johnny Heard, our beloved high school journalism teacher at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, was dying and calling students to his bedside. It was 2012.
Many of us went, reuniting after decades. The members of The Grease Pencil Gang are based on real high-school friends, but what happens in the novel is totally fabricated.
After reading Taylor Jenkins’ Reid’s Atmosphere, I was inspired to revisit what it was like to be a gay woman in the last quarter of the 20th Century, halfway in the closet. So this book leans much harder into the relationship between the protagonist, Trish, and her partner, Julia.
That’s a theme. So is how the seemingly incremental and sometimes impulsive choices we make can alter the course of our lives. Another theme is the power of an excellent teacher to shape lives. And another is the celebration of journalism as we once knew it–roaring press and all.
Yes, there’s another playlist
I am still adding to and refining it. I learned with the first novel that you can’t just print song lyrics willy-niily, so I created a Spotify playlist to recreate the mood of the novel. All these tunes are mentioned in The Next Right Thing.
Several of these people inspired characters in the book. I am on the far right, kneeling. We were participating in a trash pickup at Lake Grapevine in 1972. It was one of those days that changed the course of my life. So this photo is like an icon to me. Music was so vital to us at the time.