Item: The Bright Years
Rating: 4
Author: Catherine

The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff
Published by Simon & Schuster
Publication date: April 22, 2025
Genres: Book Clubs, Debut, Fiction, Childhood, Coming-of-age, Literary

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Four generations of one Texas family unfold on the pages of Sarah Damoff’s intimate debut, The Bright Years. What begins with the simple act of falling in love turns into something deeper and more profound as secrets and addiction pull apart the loving trio of father Ryan, mother Lillian, and daughter Georgette (Jet), leaving each to manage the fallout. The novel is told in three parts, one from each character’s perspective.

Lillian and Ryan meet when she is a bank teller he becomes infatuated with while trying to get a loan to open his own art gallery. They fall in love, with passion leading to marriage and later the arrival of their beloved daughter, Jet. Together they build a life centered around Ryan’s art. This is Lillian’s portion of The Bright Years and while it’s one of happiness it’s shattered when she shares her past with Ryan and he reacts with a drunken act of violence. Before she knows it, he’s gone. She is left alone to raise Jet, finding new sources of comfort and friendship in Elise, Ryan’s mother and Shauna, another single mother living nearby. Ryan appears and disappears, forcing Lil to repeatedly readjust her feelings in order to protect herself and her daughter.

In Part Two is Jet shares her story. It’s largely that of a childhood spent feeling loved and secure with a best friend in Kendall, the boy who lives nearby. It isn’t until the early years of high school that events lead to Jet living with Elise. She and Kendall are no more and she flounders when contemplating life as an adult. Even as her years shift between golden moments and leaden grief it’s Damoff’s tough kindness that burnishes Jet.

All that’s left is Ryan and while he’s given the ending in The Bright Years he has the fewest chapters; maybe because he has been omnipresent throughout the rest of the story. There is the love, effervescence, and commitment felt towards his wife and daughter. He’s a good, kind man, but alcohol is the insidious throughline in the novel and the lens through which he is most often seen. He lives for years cycling between drunkenness and sobriety and having only limited contact with Lillian and Jet.

This is challenging reading in the same way alcoholism is a challenging disease. Judgement is easy to come by, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a novel so carefully balanced in its depictions of the impact of alcoholism on the addict and on everyone in their life. Damoff is no apologist, there are no rationalizations for Ryan and his inability to stay sober, even as he caused pain to everyone around him. Instead, there’s an extraordinary honesty in The Bright Years that allows for the both the melancholy and the joy experienced in these three fragile messy lives.

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