The Bright Years (Simon & Schuster 2025) by Sarah Damoff shimmers as an exquisite, poignant portrait of a family crumbling as their painful pasts push their way into the present. It is a story of addiction and recovery. Of love and loss. Of forgiveness and redemption.
Set in Texas, The Bright Years takes readers on a journey with the Bright family using three points of view. First, we get a glimpse of Ryan as a child witnessing his parents’ abusive marriage in a prologue. Then we encounter Lillian, a bank teller, as she meets the aspiring artist Ryan for the first time. We stay with her through the early years of their marriage, Ryan’s decent into addiction, and their separation. Next, we get their daughter Georgette’s perspective. And finally, we travel with Ryan through his alcoholism and recovery. But this novel is so much more than a summary of its plot.
The Bright Years explores the shame and guilt of giving a child up for adoption—and the effect of that decision on everyone touched by it. Lillian keeps this secret for years after she is married and has experienced a miscarriage and the birth of a daughter. She finally tells her husband:
“But my confession doesn’t deflate my shame—it emboldens it. I regret giving up my first, flushing my second, leaving my third every morning for work. I hold guilt as close as a lover and throw myself entirely into being the best possible mom for Georgette. I don’t mean to choose her over everyone else, but’s it’s a choice made deep in my bones. And this is how I manage to miss it as my husband’s eyes begin to hollow out like craters.”
The novel masterfully explores the way parents’ patterns of behavior affect their children, how they are often duplicated when the children become parents themselves. How “Things from childhood really stick.” Ryan allows alcohol to turn him into the kind of father he was raised by, the kind of man he swore he’d never be. Even the smallest things are mirrored, Lillian discovers when she realizes she loads dishes into the dishwasher “exactly the way [her] mother did it. It’s funny what gets ingrained, like which way plates should face.”
And yet, not even experiences Damoff brings to the novel from her years as a social worker in the foster care system of Texas are what raises this novel from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Rather, it is the perfectly crafted prose, the tender insights into human nature that are dropped quietly onto page after page. The best way to appreciate how lovely Damoff’s writing is to read a series of examples drawn from the story:
“There are two kinds of grief at a wake: grieving the loss of what was and grieving the loss of what wasn’t.”
“A second marriage requires more bravery than a first.”
“We’ll reassure each other that our children are smarter and more mature than we were. We’ll make empty promises that nobody will break their hearts and that they’ll be immune to peer pressure and teen cruelties and Columbine-like shootings. We’ll hope for perfection; what mother doesn’t.”
“When I said yes all those lifetimes ago, I thought I knew more or less what I was saying yes to. But now I know none of us ever can.”
“Every death intensifies every other death.”
“Time can wash dirt off a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely.”
“Eight years have passed, and time is no healer. A mother stays even when she’s gone, like a muted moon in the daytime sky.”
“The thing about alcoholism is that there’s sickness on both sides. Drink, you’re sick. Don’t drink, you’re sick.”
“The heart thirsts for comfort like the stomach thirsts for nourishment, and the discomforted move the drink from one vessel to another. That’s why I started drinking.”
“Through choices made and not made, you entered this world like a starburst, and you let me ride your trail of light through the sky.”
And finally, there is this touching scene where Lillian tells Georgette her death doesn’t mean she will really be gone:
“I lower my shaking fingers to her heart and say slowly, “I will be here.” I move my hand to the life in her belly and say, “There.” She closes her eyes and tilts her face upward, a lone tear trailing down as she whispers with me, “And everywhere.”
Every word in The Bright Years feels pitch perfect. The novel is outstanding for its achingly accurate depiction of the effects of alcoholism on a family, for its fully fleshed-out characters, and for its poetic use of language. Each of these is true. Yet the overall impact of the novel is far greater than the sum of these parts. It’s hard to believe this is a debut novel for Damroff. We can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.
Sarah Damroff
Sarah Damroff’s writing has appeared in Porter House Review, Ruminate Magazine, and Open Global Rights, among other publications. She holds a degree in Family Studies and a Child Protection Certification from Harvard University. A Texas native, Sarah lives in Dallas with her husband and children.
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