André Santana gives a standout performance in this layered novel about grief and family. Santana portrays Cam, who returns home to Houston after the sudden death of his boyfriend, Kai. As he struggles to find himself again amid overwhelming loss, he reconnects with his childhood best friend, TJ. Santana's narration ranges from numb observation to moments of feeling overwhelmed. As Cam spirals into self-destruction, his voice becomes rougher and less controlled. Author Bryan Washington and Jake Choi give less compelling performances as Kai and TJ. Washington speaks in a monotone that doesn't capture the uniqueness of Kai's character. Choi's narration lacks the emotional depth that Santana's has. Even so, this is a moving audiobook--Washington's incredible prose and characterizations more than make up for his lackluster narration. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

★ 08/07/2023

Washington’s tender, melancholic latest (following Memorial) explores the complicated nature of grief and love. Cam, mourning the death of his lover Kai, is back in Houston after spending time in rehab, but he’s still struggling with addiction and an eating disorder. When the bar he’s working at closes, Cam accepts childhood friend TJ’s job offer at his family bakery. Between his visions of the deceased Kai and attempts to ease his pain with random hookups, Cam’s despair is palpable: he feels he is “suffocating from the weight of myself.” At the narrative’s midpoint, the perspective shifts first to Kai’s flashbacks, then to TJ, who observes that Cam’s grief and psychological work in rehab have transformed him into “a weed in the concrete that finally found wiggle room.” TJ’s parallel story is equally consuming, as he navigates his secret relationship with Ian and his budding romance with Noel, a new employee at the bakery. When Noel asks TJ to cook a meal for their family, the two begin a tentative relationship that forces TJ to question what he really wants. Washington brings his tough but fragile characters to life with quietly powerful prose, as when TJ reflects, “I didn’t want to be accepted or tolerated. I wanted to just be.” Readers will be deeply moved. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Oct.)

Praise for Family Meal

Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of Fall

NAMED A MUST READ FOR THE FALL BY TIME ● LOS ANGELES TIMES ● SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE ● TOWN & COUNTRY ● LITHUB ● KIRKUS

“Tender and poignant, Washington’s latest hits the spot.” —People

“What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear.... Family Meal juggles a lot — Cam and TJ are both dealing with their present situations and with the phantoms of opportunities ignored and hard choices enacted — but Washington lays it all out with the control and artistry of a ballet choreographer. Each story line gives the other strength." —New York Times Book Review

“[A]n achingly and beautifully etched ensemble of young Americans learning to navigate a more universal and human struggle: grief. …Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters — and readers – an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope and nourishment.” —Washington Post

“For anyone who’s read Washington’s multiple-award-winning first novel, Memorial, you know he has a knack for measured storytelling that builds momentum and gradually fills in holes before culminating in a finale that washes over you like a giant torrent of meaning and consequences that leave you gasping for air (in a good way).... Washington’s other gift is creating viscerally vulnerable characters and allowing their refreshingly open conversations to flow, showing just how hard — but ultimately rewarding — facing difficult issues head-on can be.... Ultimately, the power of Family Meal is that it shows us how to hold space for each other, through life’s highest highs and lowest lows.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[T]enderly traces the tangled relationship between grief, desire, and hunger. Each meal in the book, whether a burnt biscuit or a platter of smothered chicken, has so much heft and significance.” —Bon Appetit

“Visceral and heartbreaking, Bryan Washington’s Family Meal delves into loss and long friendships,exploring how we can reconnect with the people we need most.” —Real
Simple

“Heartbreaking, haunting, and harrowing one moment, Family Meal just as effortlessly showcases love, joy and passion the next. Like any good meal, this novel left me well fed and with plenty to chew on. I can’t wait to see what Washington cooks up next.” —Boston Globe

“Bryan Washington is already high on the list of our most exciting young authors, and with his latest release Family Meal he once again shows why our anticipation is well-deserved. … Family Meal travels the world to settings including LA, Houston, and Osaka, but Washington never loses sight of the prevailing sense of intimacy and vulnerability that makes this novel truly great.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Family Meal is filled with love—for the sensual pleasure of life, the places that we call home, the beauty of the people around us. This novel will break your heart twice over, with sadness, sure, but more unexpectedly, with joy. It takes a generous writer to show us the world in this way, and Bryan Washington is one of our best.”
—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
 
“The way Bryan Washington renders his characters, even in private moments of spectacular, sabotaging abandon, is vivid, unflinching and deeply compassionate. Brimming with food, sex, joy, intimacy, hella specific jokes, and the broken tools that we inherit to save our lives, Family Meal is nourishment. An absolutely gorgeous book.”
—Mary H.K. Choi, author of Yolk

“A poignant story about how grief and food make family of us all.” —Esquire

“One of the most evocative writers in fiction — especially when it comes to food. Washington has demonstrated an exceptional ability to write about cooking and eating in a way that always feels natural and hunger-inducing, even in the most emotionally devastating scenes. That’s especially true in his latest, Family Meal.” —Eater

“In a tale of food, sex, love and connection, Family Meal is a delicious dissection of the moments that make us the most human.” —W Magazine

"Washington offers a heart-shaking, scorchingly honest study of the damage we do ourselves, the lure of addictive behavior, and the courage it takes to face one’s anguish.... A group portrait that strikingly captures both pain and healing; highly recommended." —Library Journal (STARRED REVIEW)

"Food, family, and sex drive this intimate novel about the difficult search for true connections.... Washington brilliantly commits to his style and preoccupations in a novel about the often winding journey to family." —Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)

"Washington’s tender, melancholic latest (following Memorial) explores the complicated nature of grief and love.... Washington brings his tough but fragile characters to life with quietly powerful prose." —Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)

"Shifting between points of view, Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion. The meals his characters enjoy together through it all—from congee to collards to croissants—remind us of the many ways that love, like food, sustains us." —Bookpage (STARRED REVIEW)


Praise for Memorial

“Wryly funny, gently devastating … Washington’s hand is effortless—smooth dialogue, a love for good food, and his vibrant, sprawling, gradually gentrifying hometown—in inviting you into a nuanced love story that sticks to you like the Texas heat.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Memorial is a wonderful unconventional rom-com [and]. . . a radiant exploration of love’s permutations.” –O, The Oprah Magazine

“A fresh, vibrant love story that interweaves race, queerness, nationality, family, and intimacy with narrative ease.” —Vogue

“Implicit in a book about changing relationships and titled “Memorial” is the question of what is being preserved. The book preserves Houston and Osaka. It preserves the feeling of being young and lost. It preserves the food that gives us comfort and nourishment and purpose.” —The New York Times

“Profoundly sensitive. . . . [and] unspool[s] as spontaneously and clearly as late-night conversation. . . . Memorial is a testament to the permanence of filial connections, a clear-eyed acknowledgment that our relatives don’t always behave nicely, but they’re with us for life.” —The Washington Post

"Memorial isn't just every bit as brilliant as its predecessor. It's somehow even better.... The dialogue in the novel is pitch-perfect, but it's in the spaces between the talking — the awkward silences, the questions left unanswered — that the characters reveal themselves. It's a difficult tactic to pull off, but Washington does it masterfully... Washington is an enormously gifted author, and his writing — spare, unadorned, but beautiful — reads like the work of a writer who's been working for decades, not one who has yet to turn 30. Just like Lot, Memorial is a quietly stunning book, a masterpiece that asks us to reflect on what we owe to the people who enter our lives." —NPR

“Memorial is a true page-turner. I was entranced, picking this book up every chance I got. Bryan Washington is a great writer and I love the story he tells here. Intriguing. Each character stays with me.” —Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red At the Bone and Another Brooklyn

“Memorial dares to insist on the mundane, thoroughly lived life as a site of perennial hope, joy, and abundance. It casts a fresh take on the American family that becomes truer because of its disparate origins, the queerness of its genesis, and the buoyed wonder it finds in surviving grief and loss towards the rare and forgiving ground of difficult, hard-won love. All of this done in sentences clean and clear as cut glass. This book, in what feels like a new vision for the 21st century novel, made me happy.” 
—Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

★ 09/01/2023

In his second novel (after Memorial), NYPL Young Lion Washington offers a heart-shaking, scorchingly honest study of the damage we do ourselves, the lure of addictive behavior, and the courage it takes to face one's anguish. After the death of his lover Kai, a devastated Cam returns home to Houston from Los Angeles, haunted by Kai's loquacious ghost. Working at a queer bar called Harry's, Cam encounters TJ, to whom he was once close as breathing; TJ's Korean father and Black mother took in Cam when he was orphaned, he worked in their bakery, and together the two boys discovered what it means to be queer. Now they're estranged, and the bitterness between them is palpable. Yet so is the love. When Cam's awful emptiness pushes him into destructive behavior, affectingly shown, TJ is there for him, and Cam is later there to call out TJ's demons. It's a long road, but in the end Cam can say, "What I have learned is that we need everyone." Fittingly, everyone in this novel, from TJ's parents and bakery workers to Kai's family to bar owner Fern and his husband and son, is beautifully drawn. VERDICT A group portrait that strikingly captures both pain and healing; highly recommended.—Barbara Hoffert

★ 2023-07-13
Food, family, and sex drive this intimate novel about the difficult search for true connections.

After the tragic death of his boyfriend, Cam returns to Houston adrift, struggling with drug and sex addiction, and often seeing Kai’s ghost. He gets a job as a bartender and finds himself pulled into the life and family of TJ, his former best friend, from whom he had drifted. Cam’s grief and TJ’s resentment keep them from fully reconciling, while Cam’s addictions slowly overpower him. Readers of Washington’s other work will find a familiar style and themes here. There are several narrators who tell the story in sections, some as short as a sentence or two. The characters are rarely alone but feel isolated or alienated from their families. For a book driven by dialogue, the characters often talk at a slant, not quite saying what’s actually on their minds. The characters are part of both biological and built families. Cam and TJ grew up together and are closer than brothers. Co-workers aren’t just colleagues, but members of a family focused on achieving something together, whether that’s hanging on to one of the last gay bars in a fast-gentrifying Houston neighborhood or nourishing body and soul in TJ’s family bakery. Grief over Kai’s death creates another network. Characters find themselves pushed and pulled from their families in an often futile attempt to get away. The many families in the book are brought together through the act of cooking, and few writers bring food to life like Washington. When things are going well, the kitchens here are humming. People know exactly where everything is located, the cooks communicate almost telepathically, and the reader can nearly taste the food. Thankfully, Washington luxuriates in descriptions of smells, tastes, and textures without letting the narrative get bogged down. Many of the characters are happiest when they’re cooking or eating because that allows them to communicate without the burden of words. As Kai says, “My family taught me the difference between acceptance, allowance, and understanding. Also: just being. Sometimes they overlap. Usually, they don’t.”

Washington brilliantly commits to his style and preoccupations in a novel about the often winding journey to family.