Ryan and Lillian Bright are recently married, now parents to a baby girl.
But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about. And Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about. Their daughter comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.
This is the plot of “The Bright Years,” a new novel by Sarah Damoff out April 22.
Damoff is a Texas native currently living in Dallas, and she joined the Texas Standard to discuss her book.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us a little bit about the inspiration for your book. What made you feel like this was the story you wanted to tell?
Sarah Damoff: I have worked in social work for many years, and working with families so intimately, I’ve become very interested in, from both sides, that slow discovery of who parents are as people and how their pasts and maybe the things they haven’t shared with their families impacts the future generations.
Tell us a little bit more about your foray into being an author now. I mean, with the background in social work, did you anticipate at some point that you would have a lot of stories to tell as a result?
I did not anticipate becoming a writer in any capacity, especially not a fiction writer, but it really did happen as a natural evolution from social work because I had so many stories that I really couldn’t share because of confidentiality.
And when I would want to to process just the the humanity that I was seeing, the emotional experiences and the crises even that I was being a witness to in social work, it suddenly dawned on me that I could fictionalize the experiences and this would be a way to share an experience without breaking a particular person’s confidentiality.
Quite often people turn to writing or journaling or something along those lines when they’re trying to process having to be the conduit for a lot of very traumatic experiences – perhaps not your own experience, but the experience of others.
Could you say more about the weight of carrying those stories with you and writing as a kind of therapy?
Absolutely. I also had a tumultuous childhood. And it was important to me to write with unflinching honesty to explore some of these harder things such as loss and grief, as well as addiction being a big thread in the book.
But at the same time, it was important to me that we experienced hope and uplift and inspiration and perseverance, because in my own personal story, as well as so many families that I worked with, that was always present. So we wanna explore the full breadth of the human experience.
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I’m really intrigued by the fact that this is an intergenerational family story, and I’m curious why you chose to take that route with this.
In “The Bright Years,” we’re not exploring the foster system or anything per se, which is where I had worked, but something that I’ve seen more often than not is a grandparent taking care of a child or just an extended family member when a parent is going through something.
And so in this book, there’s some really beautiful found family through friendships. There’s also some really generous extended family members who step in when the parents aren’t there like they might want to be.
And again, this is a way of seeing, okay, there’s a broken family here, there’s a broken situation, but what happens then? I think it was Fred Rogers who would say, “look for the helpers.”
And so within the family context, which everyone has parents, everyone has a family context whatever that may be, so we can all relate to that. Who steps in to help when things break?
Some people I know tend to avoid books that talk about this level of intimate difficulty with a family, because it just hits too hard, too close. And I’m curious, when you were writing this, what were you thinking about those readers, what did you want readers to take away from this?
I will say I did not think about readers at all, and I think it served me well. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do that again or not, because in this case, it was me in my little room with my computer, and I had no connection to the publishing world. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a publisher.
My experience of writing the novel was a discovery experience. I didn’t have a plot or an outline. I had characters, and I knew kind of where they would start and where they’d end up, and I didn’t know anything else. So it was like reading but better every time I sat down at the computer, because I would discover what’s happening to them.
And so because of all of that, my thought was not about my readers, it was about my characters and held nothing back.
