When Bridges Break

What it is

In September 2014, Nicholas Affogato leaves Kings Coast, New Jersey for his freshman year at a small, unremarkable college in Western New York. He is the eldest son of a proud Italian-American family and he already knows how to lose a whole night to drinking. He is homesick, anxious, and performing a confidence he does not have. He treats the blackout version of himself as a family inheritance rather than a warning, right up until it starts making his decisions for him. The one true thing in his freshman year is Marianna, a fellow student whose clear-eyed steadiness gives him his first experience of intimacy he doesn't have to perform.

The novel moves in non-chronological fragments across three generations. Interwoven chapters trace how the Affogato and Soffio lines each carried their own damage into the marriage of Rudy and Teresa. Rudy, raised by a rageful father and a glamorous, checked-out mother, can only reach his children through anger or silence. Teresa's sister Michelle, a lawyer, is extracting herself from a marriage to a senior partner who treated her ambition as an accessory of his own.

In June 2015, on an abandoned stretch of track outside town, Nick learns two things in one afternoon: that his eighteen-year-old brother Sam is drowning in a depression the family has been calling moodiness, and that Sam's bond with his best friend Falcon is something neither brother has words for. Nick answers the moment with a joke. Sam sends him home.

That night the police deliver Sam to the family's door under arrest. The charge is never spoken aloud in the house, because the charge is not the point. In front of their parents, Sam asks Nick to say they were together all day. Nick weighs his brother against a summer of surveillance and enforced sobriety, and he tells the truth. Sam does not speak to him again for the better part of a decade. He starts telling people he has only a sister.

The rest of the book is about what that costs, who else it lands on, and how long a family can go on refusing to say the thing out loud. It ends somewhere I'm not going to give away here.

Where it sits

Literary fiction, 80,000 words. The nearest comps I'd give are Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo and Mary Beth Keane's Ask Again, Yes. It also carries into the present the late-assimilation enclave Salvatore Scibona wrote in The End.

Where it came from

I started writing this in some form in 2018. For years it was on and off, the kind of project that exists mostly as the thing you feel guilty about not working on. It didn't take its final shape until my last year of law school, and it didn't get finished until I joined a writing group here in Rochester that gave me the motivation and the structure I hadn't been able to manufacture on my own.

The book has been personal to me, though not really because of its subject matter. It's personal because I grew as a writer alongside it. Going back into chapters I wrote almost a decade ago means meeting a younger writer who doesn't exist anymore. The story matures as it goes, and so did I, and having that documented somewhere is a gift I didn't set out to give myself.

Status

The manuscript is complete and I'm querying it now. If you're an agent or an editor and any of this sounds like your kind of book, I'd love to hear from you.