Town Native Captures 1970s Needham, Family Dynamics in Debut Novel

January 5, 2026
• A Needham High School graduate returns to share his first novel.

Paul Scheufele spent 25 years in finance, finding a second career later in life as an English teacher. But he harbored a love for writing that teachers at Needham High School sparked. Writing a book “was really a lifelong goal,” he said.

Scheufele, now a full-time writer, realized that dream in late July, when he published his debut novel, “Damaged Goods.” The book was more than 10 years in the making. Scheufele will hold an author talk at the Needham Free Public Library Tuesday night.

While fiction, the book explores Scheufele’s own feelings during the 2008 recession.

At the time, Scheufele worked for a global investment bank, putting him “right in the throes” of the financial crisis, he said. That stressful experience became the backdrop for his novel, whose central character contends with both the crumbling of the mortgage market and a personal ethical dilemma: what to do with his deceased sister’s frozen eggs.

The novel follows siblings Brendan and Cassie O’Shay as they navigate a “love-hate relationship,” family secrets and impactful experiences growing up in the 1970s in Nehoidan, which Scheufele described as “a town like Needham.” Scheufele graduated from NHS in 1976 and also attended Babson College.

Local readers may recognize Devil’s Den, a popular spot for teenagers in the Town Forest, and Red Wing Bay, called Raven Bay in the book.

“The Needham connection is strong,” Scheufele said. “It goes back to really great teachers right there in town.”

Lee Allen and Lawrence Johnson, both former English teachers at NHS, broadly influenced some of the characters in the novel, Scheufele said, though all of the situations and characters are fictional. He fondly recalled his football and lacrosse coach John Bamberry, who he considered a father figure.

Capturing his youth in small town Massachusetts stirs emotions — locals have approached Scheufele since his book launch with fondness for 1970s Needham and what the community may have lost since then. The town, he said, “was definitely quite formative in the story.”

“I would say that Needham, I think, had a very strong impact on a lot of people in many different directions,” he said. “There was a lot of individuality that was being inculcated into the culture of the youth… It did, in a way, encourage individual thinking and individuality.”

During high school, he wrote sports coverage for the since-closed Needham Chronicle, and he worked at other local outlets while an undergrad at Middlebury College. He put his passion for writing on hold to pursue a career in finance, only to return to the form as a teacher in Connecticut.

“It gave me the opportunity to fully explore my desire to do creative writing,” he said. “It was something I had in me, but it took a long time to sit down and actually do the work, and I felt like I had enough life experiences to write a good novel.”

Scheufele set out to write about ethical conflict and resolution, and he became interested in in vitro fertilization and custodial issues around frozen eggs. The novel also delves into alcoholism and its generational repercussions, as well as family estrangement. Interpersonal dynamics, particularly in families, are of great interest to Scheufele.

“It was this complex story about how you balance different aspects of your life, the work life in a high-stress environment, with this monumental task of trying to decide what to do with your sister’s potential offspring after she’s passed away,” he said. “I really wanted to deal with that idea, of the ethical issues around bringing a child into the world, the biological child for a woman who is deceased.”

After finishing “Damaged Goods,” he wrote another novel that he hopes to publish by the summer of 2027. That, too, explores ethics, as well as class privilege.

Scheufele, who now lives in Boston, has reconnected with old classmates, teammates and friends since the book’s release. Some have moved away, others have stayed. The 50th anniversary of his high school graduation is this spring.

“There’s a magnet there,” he said of Needham.

After a talk, Scheufele will sell and sign copies of “Damaged Goods” at the library on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.