PAINTING GRACE

After decades of near-solitude, dying art professor Miriam Johnson discovers her final student may also be her most extraordinary.

Dr. Miriam Johnson has spent years in self-imposed isolation, haunted by the tragic death of her husband Tom and consumed by guilt over choices that now seem unforgivable. A respected art history professor at LSU, she has built walls around her heart, convinced that her unwillingness to leave Louisiana and her blindness to Tom’s despair sealed their fate.

But when a terminal cancer diagnosis forces her to hire a caregiver, nineteen-year-old Camille Caillouet arrives and quietly begins to crack those walls. Struggling through nursing school while honoring her late grandparents’ dreams, Camille becomes more than an attendant—she becomes a student of Miriam’s hard-won wisdom, and a reflection of the potential Miriam can no longer waste. What begins as a practical arrangement becomes something far deeper: a final chance for Miriam to nurture in Camille the life she feels she failed to nurture in Tom—and, in doing so, to discover that even grief can be turned toward grace.

Moving between the passionate early days of Miriam’s marriage in 1979 and her final months in 2015, this deeply moving novel explores the weight of survivor’s guilt, the complexity of love, and the transformative power of mentorship. 

In the tradition of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night, Painting Grace captures both the ache of profound loss and the surprising grace that can emerge when we open our hearts to unexpected connection.