The Way Life Should Be: A Novel

“Will Damron's passionate narration of this first novel adds additional layers of emotional depth as two men who were once married and had children discover they're gay.… Damron slightly alters his smooth and evocative delivery as the narrative reveals family friction and secrets. This family drama walks well-worn paths amid the contemporary twist of a gay marriage. —AudioFile Magazine

Dameron manages to keep all the story lines taut, and the prose is reliably crisp…Fans of Anne Beattie’s family dramas will admire this touching story. —Publishers Weekly

The joy in Dameron’s debut novel is found in the chaotic messiness of blending families, and the strength that love and laughter can provide. —The Washington Post

The Way Life Should Be is a sprawling, occasionally ribald, often moving meditation on how people who love each other can overcome uncertainty and shame—and on how the consistency of the places we love, like funky Maine beach towns, can set the stage for healing. —Down East Magazine

With humor, heart, and honesty, William Dameron captures the chaos and beauty of bringing a blended family together as one. In their idyllic yet tiny cottage on the coast of Maine, two dads find themselves unexpectedly hosting all their (nearly) adult children, who bring with them a lot of psychic baggage—secrets, resentment, and the still-festering fallout of having a father who had to leave home to be true to himself. The Way Life Should Be is an unflinching yet unabashedly romantic ode to family, and I thoroughly loved it. —Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party

Ever since I read William Dameron’s thrilling, groundbreaking memoir The Lie, I’ve known Dameron is that rare thing, a storyteller of hard truths, a skilled writer capable of creating a stunning reading experience, an instant classic. But I didn’t know that fiction was an even more compelling testament to his gifts. In The Way Life Should Be, he proves just that. In these pages he deconstructs and embraces, in fine prose, a large and complicated blended family whose lives have gone off the tracks. They meet in a small Maine house, whose ‘Cottage Rules’ provide tender and often hilarious guidelines for not killing one another. Dameron keenly follows all the family members and adjacent friends as they follow their own complicated desires and mysterious issues from the past to search for a place of balance. His finely wrought characters from all generations show us how a big, divorce-messy yet devoted family triumphs, even when squashed into a ridiculously tiny cottage. This is the way life should be: broken and gritty but whole, if its heart remains true and judgments and old grudges can be laid aside. As his protagonist Thomas says, ‘There were moments he would never want to experience again, but he wouldn’t change them, couldn’t change them, because without them, life wouldn’t be the way it is now, the way life should be.’ This is a love story to Maine, and to family. Highly recommended. —Suzanne Finnamore, bestselling author of Split: A Memoir of Divorce and My Disappearing Mother: A Memoir of Magic and Loss in the Country of Dementia