Dear Friends,
Please join us in welcoming USA Today bestselling author Sarah Damoff whose new novel The Burning Side was just released this week. Happy pub week, Sarah!
Sarah Damoff’s nationally-bestselling, heartfelt debut novel, The Bright Years was praised by the Dallas Morning News as “so masterfully constructed and so sensitively, satisfyingly written that one finds it hard to believe it is a first novel.”
She’s back with another multi-generational family saga. Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper calls The Burning Side “a deeply human story about marriage, caregiving, and the fragile ways families hold each other together.”
We hope you enjoy this chat between Sarah and F&F’s Managing Director, Meg Walker—and that you’ll grab your copies of The Burning Side now!
Your debut novel, The Bright Years, had amazing word-of-mouth buzz and an enthusiastic readership with fans on social media proclaiming it made them ugly cry. So, will you have us all ugly crying again with The Burning Side?
Probably? While writing The Burning Side, I thought it was softer emotionally, and I actually worried that those who wanted to cry might not. But I had to let the story be original and wholly distinct from The Bright Years. I can now report that tears are high amongst early readers. I don’t know if I’ll always write “tearjerkers,” but in my opinion it’s the stubborn hope in my work that evokes such deep feeling. And I do think I’ll always write hope, especially when it’s hard-won or hard-kept.
Your publisher describes The Burning Side as Parenthood meets This is Us. Is this an apt description? Care to elaborate?
Accurate! All three are excavating the intimate griefs and beauties of family life, trying not to neglect one for the other. They highlight multigenerational relationships and the passage of time in ways that are complex and honest, while maintaining warmth and joy. This feels true to life, as if you know these families—maybe you are these families—and you can understand the varying perspectives involved.
What was your original inspiration for this novel? Can you pinpoint the first spark of the idea?
I was reflecting on living with my husband’s grandparents when we were newlyweds expecting our first child. His grandmother was sick, and we moved in to help care for her. So I became a caretaker for an infant and a dying woman at the same time, which was profoundly challenging and unspeakably beautiful. My husband and I were in the first chapter of our marriage, sharing a home and dinner table with a couple in their last chapter. They had been married fifty-six years. This provided unique and formative perspective. Later, I wondered what might have been different for us if we hadn’t lived with them. That question was the spark of what I knew would become a story of two marriages at different stages under the same roof. The specifics of those marriages and characters wouldn’t reveal themselves until I started writing, but I had my framework.
The Burning Side follows a couple whose home goes up in flames the same night they decide to get a divorce. Talk about a reckoning! What dynamics were you hoping to explore by putting April and Leo into such a crucible?
At first, the fire was little more than a tool. I needed April and Leo to suddenly be forced into the parents’/in-laws’ home at a time when they were already at a breaking point. I wanted both the elder and younger couple to need each other. Once I started writing a house fire as the inciting incident, the metaphor was obvious. Also after I started writing, the January 2025 L.A. wildfires happened. I watched interviews with survivors and spent time really sitting with how utterly devastating it can be to lose a home, how much more a home is than a house. So what began as a device became more meaningful to me, and to the story as a whole. I spoke to insurance agents and people who had experienced house fires. And I’ve now heard from readers who have not only experienced divorce and not only experienced house fire, but who have even experienced both on the same night—it’s such an alchemic, bizarre connection that happens when I write from imagination but then someone finds their own story on the page.
After the fire, April and Leo retreat with their kids to April’s childhood home with her parents. What were you aiming to get across in the juxtaposition of these two very different marriages?
The two relationships have much in common: there’s always more to learn about their partners, they are never past the possibility of crisis, and they need certain expressions of commitment to survive as a unit. But it’s fascinating to explore where they differ—and why that might be. April and Leo are trying to decide whether they can change and grow alongside each other, or whether they’ve become fractured beyond repair. They are the more fragile couple when faced with hardship, whereas April’s parents are also up against a lot, but they have more relational stability. One of my favorite elements to explore was what each couple might learn from the other as they face their own unique challenges (even if some of those lessons are cautionary tales). I’m an adamant believer that parents learn as much from their kids as their kids do from them, and putting these two marriages in an almost locked-room setting was a heightened opportunity for that. Any marriage is bigger than itself, and we really get to witness that through these interconnected relationships.
You write the novel in several points of view. From April’s perspective we feel the weight of motherhood and marriage. From Leo we see the after effects of a lonely, fractured childhood. From Deb, we get the worries that arise with aging and failing health. What was your process for braiding these points of view together. Did you write each individually straight through or alternate as you went?
I alternated as I went. I can see the appeal of writing one point of view straight through, for consistency of voice, but there was a lot happening with timeline shifts and reveals, so alternating made the most sense to me. Writing this way also made it easier to capture the internal response a character might have to something we just saw through different eyes. (As a former theater kid, it’s amazing how similar the practice of writing different perspectives is to learning a script and playing a character!)
We see caregiving from multiple angles in this novel and as both a gift and a burden at times. Have you experienced or witnessed caregiving in your own life as both joyful and frustrating? What do you hope readers take away from seeing these differing perspectives in the pages of this book?
I was raised by a disabled mother, am raising three children, have been a foster parent, and had that season with my ailing grandmother-in-law, so I’ve become acquainted with various forms of caregiving—and I’m certainly not alone in that (though it can feel like it). So many of us have been in this position! And I think most caretakers experience days that are shimmering gifts, and other days that are unbearable burdens. I included a simple acknowledgment for caregivers at the back of this book because it can be such an unseen and taxing role. Many caregivers have a hard time asking for help because the need is ongoing, they want to be strong, or they don’t want to draw attention away from the person they’re caring for. But they absolutely need support in order for their caregiving to be sustainable (spoiler alert: it’s not weak to need help). So I hope readers who are in that role will feel seen, and perhaps other readers will feel compelled to reach out to a caregiver they know—a new mom, a foster parent, a nurse, or someone caring for an aging parent or loved one with a chronic illness or disability.
You quote Mary Oliver in your epigraph: “there are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?” Why did you choose this quote? What is its significance to the story you are telling in The Burning Side?
I never start writing with an underlying theme or message, but rather let that reveal itself as the characters come to life. For this book, I think the heart of it is something like: Struggle is a necessary part of love, and how beautiful when someone can come to the end of that wild journey and say, “I would do it all again.”
Where can readers meet up with you on tour? And how can our community connect with you online?
You can find me at sarahdamoff.com. I’d love to connect! I’m also on Instagram. Both places have regularly-updated information about tour events. Most of my tour stops will be in Texas, but I do have a few out-of-state and virtual options. Hope to see you there!
About the Author
Sarah Damoff is the author of The Bright Years, which was a USA TODAY bestseller and is being translated into twelve languages. She lives with her husband and children in Texas, where she has been a social worker.
About the Book
From the author of The Bright Years, the story of April and Leo, a couple on the brink of collapse. When their house goes up in flames, family secrets and thorny histories emerge as they are forced to decide what is worth salvaging.
When April and Leo’s house burns in the middle of the night, they escape with their two young children and the quiet knowledge that the fire is not the only thing threatening their family. They retreat to April’s childhood home in Dallas, where her spirited parents and siblings provide both comfort and complication.
As the family reckons with the aftermath—grief, guilt, logistics, and memories scorched and intact—the fire exposes the cracks already forming in April and Leo’s marriage. The novel unfolds in alternating perspectives: from April, who feels the crushing weight of motherhood, marriage, and self-blame; from Leo, a high school history teacher shaped by a lonely, fractured childhood; from Deb, April’s generous and no-nonsense mother who has to contend with her husband’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis; and from flashbacks that trace April and Leo’s relationship from its earliest days of connection to the devastating decisions that led them here.
A family saga suffused with humor, longing, and heartbreak, The Burning Side is about what we inherit and what we choose, about forgiveness and the ache of being known. It is, above all, about the meaning of home and the costs of long love.
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Substack gives us an amazing opportunity to cross oceans and discover the creativity of people from entirely different worlds. I would look forward to exploring your beautiful writing with great interest!