In the author’s note at the front of the advance copy of The Bright Years, Dallas author Sarah Damoff, 38, writes about how her first novel came to be.
It began with a cherished childhood friend — a boy whose father was an alcoholic — who grew up fighting that same affliction.
He lost his battle and died at age 22, leaving behind a young daughter.
By then, Damoff was already working with foster children.
“I became a social worker because of the same two realizations that would lead me to write The Bright Years,” she writes.
“The first is this: What happens in childhood matters.
The second: Even for those who suffer in childhood, there is hope yet.”
After earning a degree from the University of North Texas and spending two decades in social work, Damoff believes that “a good novel can do the same thing as a good social worker: Help someone feel a little less alone.”
The Bright Years is more than just a good novel.
It is so masterfully constructed and so sensitively, satisfyingly written that one finds it hard to believe it is a first novel.
It contains all the realism of everyday life for millions of everyday people: passionate romance, betrayal, abandonment, survival, and overcoming the odds.
It’s a family saga filled with heart and hope, pain and joy, love and grief.
And it makes you feel that you know these people because you probably know people very much like them.
The story opens in 1979 by briefly but urgently introducing the core of the story: a mother and child, Elise and Ryan Brighton, going on the run from their drunken, abusive husband and father.
Then, in turn, the novel weaves together the story of the three main characters, the Bright family of Fort Worth: Ryan, Lillian, and Georgette, nicknamed Jet.
Each one tells their own story, starting with studious young bank employee Lillian Wright and her meet-cute with bank customer Ryan Brighton in the Fort Worth Public Library.
Ryan is an aspiring artist who also wants to be a gallerist, and when he and Lillian get married, they make that happen, launching a Sundance Square gallery of local artists in 1982.
They also decide to combine their surnames to create a new married name, and thus Brighton melds with Wright to become Bright.
The abusive father is long out of Ryan’s life, but Ryan and Lillian have the love and support of his mother, Elise, and for a time, all is well.
The Sundance Gallery is growing, and Lillian becomes pregnant.
She loses that first pregnancy, but her second one is successful, and in midsummer 1986, Jet, she says, “is pulled from me like a tooth.”
As her newborn squirms inside a swaddling blanket, Lillian realizes something: “I begin to understand that keeping a child is like keeping the sky — always with me but never mine.”
Though baby Jet thrives, the gallery’s fortunes dip and rise.
Worse: Lillian has a 12-year-old secret she has been keeping from her husband, and when she finally spills it, everything changes.
Afterward, she throws herself “entirely into being the best possible mom for Georgette.
I don’t mean to choose her over everyone else, but it’s a choice made deep in my bones,” Lillian says.
“And this is how I manage to miss it when my husband’s eyes begin to hollow out like craters.”
Because of his father’s addiction, Ryan never drank alcohol, and at social events the Brights order only mocktails.
Until one day in 1987, when Ryan comes home with a six-pack of Shiner, saying he “had a drink with some of the artists last weekend.
Wasn’t a big deal.”
But Lillian is certain he “needed a secret as some kind of payback for me having a past,” and they grow apart as empty bottles and cans accumulate in the kitchen trash.
Lillian raises Jet with the help of Elise and the support of dear friends, while absent Ryan struggles through 14 years of trying to get and stay sober.
Things are better for a while when Ryan does get sober, and then things suddenly get much worse.
This part of the book starts in mid-2001, just before 9/11, and a grieving teenage Jet is aghast when “this greedy earth devours three thousand and more lives in one gulp when planes crash into the World Trade Center.”
How can anything ever feel right again?
There is realistic sadness in The Bright Years.
But there is happiness, too, because there is so much enduring love.
Where there are loyal friends and family, the Brights learn, there is hope.
Damoff is so clear-sighted, so full of understanding and humanity, that her readers, too, will surely feel a little less alone.
The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff is set to be published by Simon and Schuster on April 22, 2023.
The book spans 273 pages and is priced at $27.99.
Author appearances include a conversation with Alicia Hauge at Interabang Books in Dallas on April 22 at 6 p.m., and a conversation with Amanda Churchill at Monkey and Dog Books in Fort Worth on April 30 at 6:30 p.m.
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