Sarah Damoff ('09) knows how tough it is to be a social worker.

She worked as a social worker on and off for 10 years in Denton and Dallas. At one center that served children who went through the foster care system, "I would almost feel bad a lot of times," Damoff says. "It would get to me so much because the kids are the ones living it. What they've been through, just some of their stories, the violence they had seen and endured, was utterly heartbreaking."

She wanted to share experiences from her career, but knew she had to keep details confidential. So, she found another way.

"Not everybody is going to go work in a residential treatment center or open their home to foster kids. But a lot more people might read a book and find out what it is really like."

The Dallas-based alumna has written The Bright Years, a novel that explores one family's journey as the father battles alcoholism. Damoff's own path as a novelist with a major publisher, Simon & Schuster, is unexpected. She draws on her degree in development and family studies to give readers a new perspective.

"My whole desire goes a little bit beyond entertainment. I want people to see their own experience in it, and have some kind of comfort, some kind of small healing."

Learning from Others

Damoff's own family life growing up was "fairly tumultuous." Her parents divorced when she was 11 years old. She lost her mom as a teenager and she moved around the Dallas-Fort Worth region.

She knows the importance of childhood and how much it forms each individual's life and personality. As a high school student, she volunteered at children's advocacy centers. When she came to UNT, Damoff started out as an elementary education major, but then took classes in abnormal child psychology -- which included simulations with the students functioning as though they had special needs -- that had such an impact on her she changed majors.

"I wanted to work with children who had harder paths in their early years, and help serve them as they try to make sense of that, and make their way as they transition through adolescence and into adulthood."

But working in the social work field was an intense environment. The students had tough experiences in the foster care system and needed a higher level of care. She developed health issues due to stress.

When she had her own children, Damoff took a pause in her career to raise her family. She also fostered a baby and worked with refugee children. She earned a child protection certification from Harvard University. She worked with Court Appointed Special Advocates(CASA) for seven years. And she discovered an outlet to express her feelings and experiences.

Opening Possibilities

Always a voracious reader, Damoff started writing fiction about four years ago. She read the 2019 novel Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, about children who immigrated from Mexico to the United States, and realized justice work can be shown through fiction.

"As a reader, there are characters I've met in fiction, and paragraphs and sentences I've read that stay with me and impact how I live my own life," she says. "It just kind of opened possibilities for me into merging those interests in my life."

She wrote her first draft in late 2021, taking her time and putting it aside for six months, while getting short stories published in literary magazines.

"When I sat down to write The Bright Years, I remember saying, 'My only agenda is to tell a beautiful family story, just to humanize what it is that so many families go through.' Lots of us can relate to at least bits and pieces and emotions and thoughts that the characters have."

The book was originally written as letters between a mother and daughter. The plot evolved so it's told through the points of view of three family members -- the mother, father and daughter -- spanning 60 years.

"The heart of the premise that originally came to me was the things that the mother might want to tell her daughter as her daughter's getting older. As children, we have to come to understand our parents are people, and our parents were people before we were born. And they have stories and histories, and those things then impact the next generation."

In 2023, she pulled back from her part-time work with CASA to focus full time on writing. She's now working on her second novel, another multi-generational family story.

"It's very important to me to feel like my work is meaningful," she says. "I'm seeing how fiction can impact people. I never planned on pursuing this path, but it is perfect for me."