Dana Perino’s Debut Novel ‘Purple State’ Explores How Personal Choices Transcend Political Divides

Television host and former White House press secretary Dana Perino is making her fiction debut with “Purple State,” a novel tracing three women through quarter-life crises in a politically divided America. The book serves as a narrative companion to her earlier mentoring guide “Everything Will Be Okay,” extending her focus on career, relationships, and personal growth beyond the partisan noise.

Perino has described “Purple State” as a deliberate extension of the themes she explored in “Everything Will Be Okay,” her 2021 mentoring book aimed at young women entering the workforce. That earlier title, which spent weeks on bestseller lists, grew out of years of informal mentoring sessions Perino conducted with interns, junior staffers, and viewers who wrote asking for career advice. The new novel fictionalizes those recurring conversations, following three friends whose choices about marriage, motherhood, geographic roots, and professional ambition diverge sharply — yet whose friendships endure across political lines. The “purple state” of the title refers both to the fictional setting and to the emotional middle ground where most Americans actually live their lives.

The book arrives at a moment when polling consistently shows Americans reporting record levels of political exhaustion. A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year found that roughly 65 percent of adults say they feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while surveys from Gallup and the American Enterprise Institute have documented declining marriage and birth rates among Americans under 35. Perino has publicly argued that cable-news framing too often reduces private decisions — when to marry, whether to have children, where to build a career — into proxies for partisan identity. Her novel pushes back on that framing by depicting characters whose red-state and blue-state instincts fade in importance once they face concrete life decisions.

Industry observers will be watching whether “Purple State” can replicate the crossover success of political figures who have pivoted to fiction, a list that includes Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, and the late Senator Barbara Boxer. Unlike those politically charged thrillers, however, Perino’s book is being positioned as a domestic, character-driven novel in the tradition of women’s contemporary fiction rather than a Washington potboiler. A book tour and companion podcast discussions are expected to accompany the release, with Perino likely to use the platform to continue promoting civic engagement and cross-partisan friendship — themes she has woven through her broadcasting work for more than a decade.