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Family Meal
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Fiction (2023)Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?
When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.
When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.
320 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 10, 2023
About the author
Bryan Washington
11 books1,320 followersBryan Washington is an American writer. He published his debut short story collection, Lot, in 2019 and a novel, Memorial, in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,414 reviews
December 23, 2023
it seems washington is one of those authors whose books i want to love but in reality, i do not. i liked the premise of this one but the style, especially when it comes to the dialogues and the character's inner thoughts, strike me as clunky, and not in a realistic way but in a rather laboured manner. the moments of tension were particularly unconvincing and just came across as poorly delivered lines. the arguments felt contrived as if acted out by a bunch of very green theatre students. the novel wants to be realistic and unfiltered in its portrayal of depression, grief, and addiction, but these things are depicted in an almost gimmicky way. not quite sensationalistic but in an annoyingly rooney-esque way (affected edginess). here the narrative feels particularly disjointed due to the novel's structure, which falls prey to the overused switch in perspective. there were moments where i perceived something close to nuance, but these quieter moments are lost in (over)dramatic sequences where we watch our mc going down the well-trodden path of a self-destructive 'messy' protagonist.
anyway, those are my thoughts about family meal. if this novel happens to be on your radar i recommend you check out other readers takes on it.
anyway, those are my thoughts about family meal. if this novel happens to be on your radar i recommend you check out other readers takes on it.
November 21, 2024
love is a tangible thing. It is palpable. You can hold it in your hands. You can see it in the air. You can breathe it in and hold it and push that shit right back out of your lungs. When it dissolves, you might not see it, but that won’t mean it wasn’t there. Because you were.EDIT: Congratulations to Washington for winning the Lambda award for best gay fiction.
This is a book that leaves me befuddled. I want to love it but it doesn't seem to care if I do. It's a story that straddles the line between tender and tragic, like a bruise. Family Meal struggles to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, Memorial, one of my favourite books of all time. Unlike Memorial with a clear vision, Family Meal is like an abstract mosaic. It requires the reader to distance themselves further and further until they get a clear picture. But this story doesn't get clearer, it gets austere.
Fine Art America
We start with Cam, a young man who has recently experienced a great tragedy. One which is drip-fed until its details are suddenly revealed. Cam is haunted, literally. He was having drug-induced conversations with the ghosts of loved ones past. He is lonely, tortured. Afraid of healing. His was my favorite narrative in the entire book. I had hoped the whole book would be about him. In one of his conversations, he's told, Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai. Cam is taking chicanes to avoid processing his loss. He's focusing on everything wrong with the ether. He does struggle with how to approach his issues.
I think about telling Minh what’s been going on, with __ and the dreams and the drugs and the fucking and how everything feels like it’s smothering me at once, like I’m fucking suffocating from the weight of myself.Cam felt like every time I've ever failed to pick up the phone and utter the most difficult word of them all, "help".
Cam was also the best part of this book. In his article about ghost stories and queerness , Nell Stevens says, "To read is always to experience a haunting, to be alone while in the company of another consciousness, to receive messages from a person who isn’t there." Cam experiences this physically. He's lost in the miasma of melancholia. He sought drugs not to weaken the strength of his feelings but to keep feeling lost. At one point, I keep going until the night swallows me whole because it’s something to fucking do.
In him, I saw my pain, my despair. Some self-made, some circumstantive. And I would have liked to spend more time with someone so... relatable. But there were other stories to be explored. Kai, the effervescent translator who refused to be tied down by roots, and TJ, the baker who seems unmoored. Kai is a Black translator, a role I've never read about before but would love to see more of.
If you’re Black and you’re a translator then people look at you funny. They get this fold right over their nose. You can’t see it unless you’re looking for it. But if you’re looking for it, you can’t unsee it.For him, the most important thing was connection. A right to explore, expand. And his mother and sister struggled with his need to fly away.
My family taught me the difference between acceptance, allowance, and understanding. Also: just being. Sometimes they overlap. Usually, they don’t.Eventually, Kai had to set sail, which his sister resented him for. In this way, she was a translator, too. We misread each other.
Finally, we spend time with TJ. A baker who is HIV+ and wondering where his place in life is. He's involved with a closeted man who treats him like an accessory. Worse, an appendage. Something vestigial and hidden. But TJ can't help himself and he can't explain why. He is Cam's oldest friend and their friendship is one that is push-push. Cam pushes TJ away and TJ lets him. Some people set the key of their lives inside you and simply turn.
TJ's existentialism is almost relatable. His story isn't as tragic as Cam's, dare I say, not as entertaining. Tolstoy said , "lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”" It's a good thing that TJ is a baker, because one of the cures to this is epicureanism, at least according to Tolstoy.
TJ is also dealing with loss, ambiguous and empirical. When Cam went through his tragedy, he left TJ. Refused to look for him, reach for him. TJ was heartbroken and when Cam returns in his life, they struggle to regain their footing. They were dance partners. Cam went off beat then left the floor. TJ doesn't care to tangle any more.
He is struggling with identity. I didn’t want to explain or justify. I didn’t want to be accepted or tolerated. I wanted to just be. He doesn't want to hurt others. There’s no way not to hurt anyone, says Emi. Even if you really try. You’ll only end up burning yourself. He remains existential Isn’t living a terminal condition?
Ultimately, this book is about the healing power of shared meals. It's about how friendships, relationships, complex human connections are essential to other peoples' well-being. As I observed in my review of The Memory Police , you can measure your impact on the impressions you leave on others. The negative space created by your memory. Family Meal asks you to consider the roles that other people play in your life.
With every single person we touch, we’re leaving parts of ourselves.All the philosophers, such as the seminal Chris Cornell, said to be yourself is all that you can do. And you can only live for yourself, your goals, your dreams, your plans. In my culture, we originally lived in homesteads and communes. We existed for each other. Everyone contributed to the well-being of the homestead through their role, regardless of age and gender. Capitalism has erased this symbiosis and narrowed us to cogs working tirelessly to fill the coffers of greedy leaders and business owners in exchange for housing, healthcare and survival. The things that give us joy are stolen moments. Stopping to smell the roses is radical. Family Meal takes this message, turns it inside out and tells you maybe you should live for others.
I struggled with my rating for this book. But the more I think about it, the more I love it. Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t. Ultimately,
It takes all of these people to make one person’s life okay. One person can’t do it for you by themselves.Washington also says it in his interview with Shondaland , " Capacity is a really interesting way of thinking about it because one of the components that was really important to me was taking each of these characters and seeing what care looked like for them, which is to say: What forms of care do they need? What forms of care can they provide? And how would they change themselves and their senses of care to take care of those around them? Whether it’s a friend, a romantic partner, someone in between, whether it’s family. One of the questions that felt central to me in regards to care was the role that it can play in friendship, and the ways in which that care can change over the years inside of a friendship." Have you cared to make someone ok today?
August 29, 2023
Family Meal is about three men, Cam, TJ, and Kai, but only two of them can share their life stories because the third one is dead. And still, Kai is present in every move, on every page, in every sentence, and eventually tells his story too.
Bryan Washington wrote a raw book about grief, love, and (found) family. About finding a home. About the responsibility to take care of each other. About just trying to be, if life’s too tough. And of course about food.
After losing the love of his life, Cam doesn’t want to feel pain, so he dives into unprotected sex, drugs, not eating, and messing up others. Slowly he’s destroying himself.
I had to adjust myself in the first pages because Bryan wrote this book without quotation marks in the dialogues, and I actually hate books without them. I need punctuation for the overview and insight into the story, and I get lost without them. But I must admit that it fitted Family Meal, and it made this story even better—the rawness more grittier, the grief more sadder, the food more tasteful.
When I started reading, a knot knitted itself in my stomach and grew bigger and bigger, reaching my lungs so I almost couldn’t breathe anymore, scratching my heart until it was scarred so badly that it went from sore to unbearably painful. Not only because of Cam’s self-destruction but also because of how Kai died and because of TJ, who seemed steady as a rock but had his own sh*t to deal with.
Family Meal is not for the faint of heart. There’s lots of sex (not that graphic, though), lots of drug use, and lots of cheating. But there’s so much love too. Cam’s memory of that last day with Kai when he bought his boyfriend flowers—sunflowers because Kai loved them so much—was so sweet that my eyes clouded with tears. The moment TJ found Cam at the bayou in the rain made my heart hopeful. And at the end, I had to put my e-reader away several times because otherwise, I’d have sobbed uncontrollably. Not because the ending was sad but because of the beautiful love that shone through all the darkness from before. There’s a guy on the back porch holding a cat. And he’s just trying to be.
I received an ARC from Atlantic Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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Bryan Washington wrote a raw book about grief, love, and (found) family. About finding a home. About the responsibility to take care of each other. About just trying to be, if life’s too tough. And of course about food.
After losing the love of his life, Cam doesn’t want to feel pain, so he dives into unprotected sex, drugs, not eating, and messing up others. Slowly he’s destroying himself.
I had to adjust myself in the first pages because Bryan wrote this book without quotation marks in the dialogues, and I actually hate books without them. I need punctuation for the overview and insight into the story, and I get lost without them. But I must admit that it fitted Family Meal, and it made this story even better—the rawness more grittier, the grief more sadder, the food more tasteful.
When I started reading, a knot knitted itself in my stomach and grew bigger and bigger, reaching my lungs so I almost couldn’t breathe anymore, scratching my heart until it was scarred so badly that it went from sore to unbearably painful. Not only because of Cam’s self-destruction but also because of how Kai died and because of TJ, who seemed steady as a rock but had his own sh*t to deal with.
Family Meal is not for the faint of heart. There’s lots of sex (not that graphic, though), lots of drug use, and lots of cheating. But there’s so much love too. Cam’s memory of that last day with Kai when he bought his boyfriend flowers—sunflowers because Kai loved them so much—was so sweet that my eyes clouded with tears. The moment TJ found Cam at the bayou in the rain made my heart hopeful. And at the end, I had to put my e-reader away several times because otherwise, I’d have sobbed uncontrollably. Not because the ending was sad but because of the beautiful love that shone through all the darkness from before. There’s a guy on the back porch holding a cat. And he’s just trying to be.
I received an ARC from Atlantic Books and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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December 18, 2023
I respect Bryan Washington even though his books don’t seem to do it for me! In Family Meal, Washington tackles themes of grief, how loss can intersect with sex and disordered eating and substance use. I appreciate him for tackling difficult mental health related-topics. I also like how Washington writes queer men of color without centering whiteness and white people in his novels. There’s a cultural authenticity in Family Meal that doesn’t feel forced. I also felt that Washington’s ability to develop three-dimensional characters who actually grow – albeit in messy ways – has improved since his prior book
Memorial
.
Unfortunately I still find Washington’s prose itself unconvincing. The characters’ conversations with one another, especially the more emotional ones, felt contrived. Because of the clunky writing I felt myself reading these characters from a distance, more like “okay, this character is growing through X grief thing” or “now this character is coping with Y grief thing through Z” instead of feeling immersed in the story.
Three stars, though I appreciate what Washington is putting out there when the lgbtq literary scene is still so white. Also, big shout out to Washington for mentioning Onces, NewJeans, and Red Velvet all within the span of two to three pages. We love a man with taste!
Unfortunately I still find Washington’s prose itself unconvincing. The characters’ conversations with one another, especially the more emotional ones, felt contrived. Because of the clunky writing I felt myself reading these characters from a distance, more like “okay, this character is growing through X grief thing” or “now this character is coping with Y grief thing through Z” instead of feeling immersed in the story.
Three stars, though I appreciate what Washington is putting out there when the lgbtq literary scene is still so white. Also, big shout out to Washington for mentioning Onces, NewJeans, and Red Velvet all within the span of two to three pages. We love a man with taste!
Want to read
May 10, 2024addicted to making my first book by an author be the most random one
November 25, 2023
In his latest novel, Washington tells the story of Cam who tries to come to terms with the death of his partner Kai. As his life spirals out of control due to substance abuse and sex addiction (both intended as measures of self-medication), Cam moves back from L.A. to his home town of Houston, where he coincidentally meets his old school buddy and former best friend TJ, a Korean-American poz and queer man who is fighting his own demons. Will the friends be able to lift each other up?
This is a typical Washington, portraying socioeconomic realities in Houston, displaying the city's diverse population, particularly queer Black and Asian characters, and underlining the power of community, here centered around the metaphor of sharing a meal with your biological and/or chosen family. While the author's aims are excellent and the messages are important, the storytelling remains rather tame IMHO, and a little too lengthy as well as predictable. Granted, the text has quite a few well rendered and explicit gay sex scenes (and let's face it: contemporary novels are not exactly full of good sex scenes, gay or straight), and there is also an interesting changing POV from Cam to (deceased) Kai to TJ, but overall, it's not exactly in-your-face, riveting literature. But then again, I like my literature loud and more experimental, which, to be fair, is not what Washington wants to do.
You can listen to our discussion on the podcast (in German, tr.: An einem Tisch) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/allgemei...
This is a typical Washington, portraying socioeconomic realities in Houston, displaying the city's diverse population, particularly queer Black and Asian characters, and underlining the power of community, here centered around the metaphor of sharing a meal with your biological and/or chosen family. While the author's aims are excellent and the messages are important, the storytelling remains rather tame IMHO, and a little too lengthy as well as predictable. Granted, the text has quite a few well rendered and explicit gay sex scenes (and let's face it: contemporary novels are not exactly full of good sex scenes, gay or straight), and there is also an interesting changing POV from Cam to (deceased) Kai to TJ, but overall, it's not exactly in-your-face, riveting literature. But then again, I like my literature loud and more experimental, which, to be fair, is not what Washington wants to do.
You can listen to our discussion on the podcast (in German, tr.: An einem Tisch) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/allgemei...
February 20, 2023
Equal parts tender and brutal, FAMILY MEAL is what happens when you crack an egg and marvel at the gentleness of the yolk inside. FAMILY MEAL follows three queer men: one dead, one slowly killing himself, and one inadvertently and begrudgingly picking up the pieces of both. Washington writes about food, family, and the love at the intersection of both with his signature depth and precision. You will close your eyes and taste the way Cam's grief mixes with TJ's fragile hope. A masterclass on all counts.
October 15, 2023
The thing about Bryan Washington's novels is that in some ways they are everything I love and in other ways they are not my thing. There's always some tension there, but so far I've finished them both and I suspect I will continue to come back.
I love the Houston setting, the way his characters feel like people I know, how unapologetically queer everything is, his thoughtfulness and care with his characters. He really lets us sit in struggle but also lets us soak in love.
They are also novels that can feel plotless, that have a fluidity to them, and this is harder for me. I tend to be a plot and momentum person. Novels people call poetic are not really for me and I think Washington falls in that category. But I think it's saying something that most of those novels I do not read but Washington I will finish and finish happily.
I found this a lot heavier than Memorial, Cam in particular is one of those people who seems to have encountered so much pain and struggle that it can feel overwhelming. (There is police violence against a Black person that hits pretty hard.) Every character here has a lot they're grappling with and they all come to it in different ways. The three different perspectives here really flesh things out, getting to see TJ from Cam's perspective and then Cam from TJ's perspective really opens things up.
This book just feels so lived in. I loved that.
I love the Houston setting, the way his characters feel like people I know, how unapologetically queer everything is, his thoughtfulness and care with his characters. He really lets us sit in struggle but also lets us soak in love.
They are also novels that can feel plotless, that have a fluidity to them, and this is harder for me. I tend to be a plot and momentum person. Novels people call poetic are not really for me and I think Washington falls in that category. But I think it's saying something that most of those novels I do not read but Washington I will finish and finish happily.
I found this a lot heavier than Memorial, Cam in particular is one of those people who seems to have encountered so much pain and struggle that it can feel overwhelming. (There is police violence against a Black person that hits pretty hard.) Every character here has a lot they're grappling with and they all come to it in different ways. The three different perspectives here really flesh things out, getting to see TJ from Cam's perspective and then Cam from TJ's perspective really opens things up.
This book just feels so lived in. I loved that.
September 29, 2023
I really liked this book. Deeply readable. I kept wanting to get back to it. The first 2 sections are fantastic. Part 3 gets a bit lost. Overall it’s really good and I’m so glad I read it.
December 15, 2023
An exploration of grief and the ways in which community can mend our hurt. In his sophomore novel, Bryan Washington returns to many of the themes and ideas he explored in Memorial: food, intimacy, trust, and love. Told in his spare prose and with blunt depictions of sex, addiction, and depression, Washington plumbs the depths of his characters to explore how we can lift one another up in a world that feels built to tear us down.
When Cam's boyfriend Kai dies, he returns from Los Angeles to Houston and runs into an old friend, more like a brother, TJ. While working at a bar and dealing with an eating disorder and undiagnosed sex addiction, Cam struggles to stay afloat on his own. But what happens when he leans into trust and allows his found family to buoy him for a while?
This is a very raw, vulnerable story. It's not always enjoyable to read because Cam, understandably, makes some pretty poor decisions in the throes of grief. But Washington somehow manages to suffuse these problematic actions with empathy, showing one person's effort to find themselves again after unimaginable loss. I really enjoyed how scenes would build on each other to show a fuller picture of Cam and his friends' lives, and despite the really simple writing style, there's a lot of depth. It's the kind of writing that affects you as you keep reading and realize there is so much going on under the surface.
However, the story itself felt a bit too disjointed for me. It switches partway through to a new perspective which I really liked, but then when it switched again I felt like we didn't get enough resolution from one story to jump so quickly to another. I understand the intentions of that switch, and I think it makes sense on paper, but this just didn't personally work for me during the reading experience.
I will keep checking out what Washington does because I think he has a very contemporary point of view and speaks to the modern millennial voice quite well.
When Cam's boyfriend Kai dies, he returns from Los Angeles to Houston and runs into an old friend, more like a brother, TJ. While working at a bar and dealing with an eating disorder and undiagnosed sex addiction, Cam struggles to stay afloat on his own. But what happens when he leans into trust and allows his found family to buoy him for a while?
This is a very raw, vulnerable story. It's not always enjoyable to read because Cam, understandably, makes some pretty poor decisions in the throes of grief. But Washington somehow manages to suffuse these problematic actions with empathy, showing one person's effort to find themselves again after unimaginable loss. I really enjoyed how scenes would build on each other to show a fuller picture of Cam and his friends' lives, and despite the really simple writing style, there's a lot of depth. It's the kind of writing that affects you as you keep reading and realize there is so much going on under the surface.
However, the story itself felt a bit too disjointed for me. It switches partway through to a new perspective which I really liked, but then when it switched again I felt like we didn't get enough resolution from one story to jump so quickly to another. I understand the intentions of that switch, and I think it makes sense on paper, but this just didn't personally work for me during the reading experience.
I will keep checking out what Washington does because I think he has a very contemporary point of view and speaks to the modern millennial voice quite well.
July 9, 2024
fuck. the love of it all.
in order to talk about how close family meal hits to home, we have to go back to december.
there’s a certain grief to having someone stroll into you life, completely alter it, & how acutely you feel that hollowness between your ribs when they leave (what kind of queer kid experience—)
that was december for me, when i met someone important from my past. someone who rewrote chapters of life when maybe i was just a footnote in hers. every single time i read a bryan washington novel, she is who i think of. as fate would have it, i met her right when i read family meal.
till today, i quietly carry parts of her with me. in particular, the way she uses food as a love language: have you eaten? do you want more food? i made you breakfast. i went to a party & the cake was really good so i brought home a slice for you.
there’s plenty of grief & ghosts in family meal. it’s a bryan washington novel after all. it asks what happens when the love of your life becomes the loss of your life. the heart of family meal, however, is how we show a love that persists through the grief. the love that carries on. the nuances of it all.
one of my favorite things about humanity is how we weave so much of our i love yous into our actions: waking up earlier & staying up late just to send a smidge more time together. text me when you get home safe. that made me think of you.
family meal is full of it.
there’s also the stilted, choppy words, the breaks, everything in washington’s novels that should cause discomfort & yet here i am, comfort in the chaos. comfort in the mess. because i know this ruin.
it echoes sentiments that i hold close, that i let myself find solace in: how i give pieces of myself to people, how i am pieces of everyone i have ever loved. how i believe love is a tangible thing. because we exist.
did i build a life around bryan washington’s words or did it build a life around me?
“that's how it goes. ad infinitum. with every single person we touch, we're leaving parts of ourselves. we live through them. i thought that was bullshit and i was wrong, because it isn't. […] and you know what? i’m fucking grateful for that. it’s horrible, but i’m grateful.”
in order to talk about how close family meal hits to home, we have to go back to december.
there’s a certain grief to having someone stroll into you life, completely alter it, & how acutely you feel that hollowness between your ribs when they leave (what kind of queer kid experience—)
that was december for me, when i met someone important from my past. someone who rewrote chapters of life when maybe i was just a footnote in hers. every single time i read a bryan washington novel, she is who i think of. as fate would have it, i met her right when i read family meal.
till today, i quietly carry parts of her with me. in particular, the way she uses food as a love language: have you eaten? do you want more food? i made you breakfast. i went to a party & the cake was really good so i brought home a slice for you.
there’s plenty of grief & ghosts in family meal. it’s a bryan washington novel after all. it asks what happens when the love of your life becomes the loss of your life. the heart of family meal, however, is how we show a love that persists through the grief. the love that carries on. the nuances of it all.
one of my favorite things about humanity is how we weave so much of our i love yous into our actions: waking up earlier & staying up late just to send a smidge more time together. text me when you get home safe. that made me think of you.
family meal is full of it.
there’s also the stilted, choppy words, the breaks, everything in washington’s novels that should cause discomfort & yet here i am, comfort in the chaos. comfort in the mess. because i know this ruin.
it echoes sentiments that i hold close, that i let myself find solace in: how i give pieces of myself to people, how i am pieces of everyone i have ever loved. how i believe love is a tangible thing. because we exist.
did i build a life around bryan washington’s words or did it build a life around me?
October 30, 2023
I had a hard time getting into this book because the first part focuses on Cam, who engages in destructive behavior after the death of the love of his life. I listened to the book, and it was just hard to hear the details of the reckless graphic sexual encounters over and over. Then the perspective shifts to that of the dead boyfriend, and later to Cam’s best friend, giving more context to Cam, but also letting up on the self destruction. The themes of family, both blood relations and found, and food as connection were the strongest part for me. I found it unsatisfying that the book never returns to Cam’s perspective. We were so embedded in his downward spiral, it felt like taking the easy way out for his recovery to only be described by others rather than in his own words. While his grief is at the center of this book, we never understand how he recovers, we are simply told that he has and that is frustrating after enduring the first third of the book.
November 15, 2023
Cam returns to Houston after experiencing the devastating loss of his boyfriend in LA. He reunites with TJ, once his closest friend. TJ’s family still owns and operates a successful bakery in town. A lot of time has passed since Cam and TJ were close and there are a lot of things left unsaid as well as lingering resentment.
While TJ attempts to help Cam, he is working through his own challenges and secrets. It’s hard for him to watch Cam’s destruction too.
Family Meal is undoubtedly uncomfortable. It includes a lot of heavy topics. It also includes a lot of hooking up. This is my second Bryan Washington book and I’m here for his writing — it’s not quite stream of consciousness, which is a style that doesn’t usually work well for me, but he writes flawed, authentic characters so well.
While TJ attempts to help Cam, he is working through his own challenges and secrets. It’s hard for him to watch Cam’s destruction too.
Family Meal is undoubtedly uncomfortable. It includes a lot of heavy topics. It also includes a lot of hooking up. This is my second Bryan Washington book and I’m here for his writing — it’s not quite stream of consciousness, which is a style that doesn’t usually work well for me, but he writes flawed, authentic characters so well.
October 2, 2023
Bryan Washington's FAMILY MEAL is one of my most anticipated Fall 2023 reads after loving his last book, Memorial. FAMILY MEAL is an unapologetically queer novel about love, grief, chosen-family, and self-acceptance. The story centers around three main characters—Cam, his boyfriend Kai who has recently passed away, and TJ. TJ and Cam grew up together after Cam's parents had died when he was younger, but the two have a strained relationship as adults. When Cam moves back to Houston after living in Los Angeles with his boyfriend, he is picking up the pieces after Kai's death and learning how to move on and cope. Cam is emotionally unstable, maintaining a job at a local bar struggling to survive real estate costs, while putting himself in irresponsible sexual encounters to mask his pain. When Cam bumps into TJ, the two try to work towards a healthy future together after being estranged for so long.
FAMILY MEAL is a story about love, sex, and vulnerability. I don't want to give too much about this book, but it is emotionally charged to say the least. The Karens will lose it over the gay sex that is featured in this book, but it isn't very explicit for those who like a more "fade to black" type of romantic encounter in their books. This book is grief heavy and will make you think—specifically for how the queer community creates their own family during times in need and how to navigate that. I could relate to parts of this book, and I also could see people in my inner circle resembling some of the characters. FAMILY MEAL gets another stamp of approval by me from Bryan Washington. I will read anything he publishes for his readers.
FAMILY MEAL is a story about love, sex, and vulnerability. I don't want to give too much about this book, but it is emotionally charged to say the least. The Karens will lose it over the gay sex that is featured in this book, but it isn't very explicit for those who like a more "fade to black" type of romantic encounter in their books. This book is grief heavy and will make you think—specifically for how the queer community creates their own family during times in need and how to navigate that. I could relate to parts of this book, and I also could see people in my inner circle resembling some of the characters. FAMILY MEAL gets another stamp of approval by me from Bryan Washington. I will read anything he publishes for his readers.
June 14, 2023
Devoured this novel. There’s so much heart in these pages. I teared up multiple times. These characters and their stories will stay with me for a minute. Washington is one of the best American writers right now. His writing is sharp. His prose just flows. I’m obsessed. Grateful that someone is writing Queer novels and characters this way.
April 26, 2023
my first bryan washington! what a treat. i've been really picky about reading lately and this one hit all the right notes i was looking for: sparse, tight, and honest, with the right mix of jagged anger and sadness running throughout. i was hooked from the moment i realized this was a friendship breakup-reconciliation book -- friends who feel like family. who ARE family. washington does such a great job of capturing that "fuck you" banter that you only get when you're so close to someone you see who they are at their core.
(also i appreciated how many queer asian/half asian characters there were??? is this common in his books?? i will have to investigate...)
(also i appreciated how many queer asian/half asian characters there were??? is this common in his books?? i will have to investigate...)
December 25, 2023
“It’s our responsibility to take care of each other.”
It really is. Reading this book I felt cared for. I felt involved in a process of going-off-the-deep-end, of truth-finding, of pain, and healing, and love.
I love Bryan Washington’s writing and I’ll honestly read whatever he writes. His characters absolutely consumed my last few days.
There’s something to be said for taking a chance to accomplish something you never ever thought you could, regardless of whether or not the success lasts. That’s what love is. It comes across so easily in this book, but the book ain’t easy!
I also love the images interspersed throughout - what a beautifully calming touch!
It really is. Reading this book I felt cared for. I felt involved in a process of going-off-the-deep-end, of truth-finding, of pain, and healing, and love.
I love Bryan Washington’s writing and I’ll honestly read whatever he writes. His characters absolutely consumed my last few days.
There’s something to be said for taking a chance to accomplish something you never ever thought you could, regardless of whether or not the success lasts. That’s what love is. It comes across so easily in this book, but the book ain’t easy!
I also love the images interspersed throughout - what a beautifully calming touch!
August 17, 2024
bar so low this year that my only requirement for an audiobook is „voice of narrator doesn’t give me a headache“
(and yet, whoever narrated the kai chapters: you’re on thin ice)
(and yet, whoever narrated the kai chapters: you’re on thin ice)
September 26, 2023
Many thanks to Penguin Random House for this ARC.
This is my third Bryan Washington book (to the best of my knowledge that is everything he has published) and it revisits many themes and concerns of earlier works. In some interesting ways it creates a bridge between the two earlier books, Lot and Memorial (or maybe Memorial is a bridge between this and Lot - I have to think on that.)
This is a book about living through grief and recovery from grief (both fresh grief and past grief that creates the foundation upon which we process new grief.) This is a book about self-destruction and self-preservation, both in relation to grief response and not. This is a book about love, in so many forms, familial (by birth, circumstance, or choice), romantic, and radical love for those who touch our lives even fleetingly and whom we can meet in many differnt ways. This is a book about cultural disconnects, especially for people of mixed-race and those who grow up in non-bio families where they have different ethnic/racial identifiers than than the other family members. This is a book about sex and all the things it can mean and not mean. (Other reviews mention a lot of cheating, which is untrue. People are non-monogamous by agreement, everyone respects the agreed upon ground rules. That is not cheating. There is only one person here who we know is cheating, a closeted man who is engaged to a woman and secretly having sex with men.) And this is a book about food, about the pleasure and pain it can bring, about how it is a way to show love, deny love to ourselves, and to find a substitute for love through overindulgence. Certainly it is also a book about racism. These people are who they are, in part, because of their cultural connections and their presentation. Some concern themselves with taking up less space, with not being seen, some have more anger and fear in common everyday interactions. Some BIPOC characters forget for a moment how the White people see them and that forgetting brings life-changing consequences. There is no "racism is bad" soliloquy. Rather there are people living, and the fact of living while Black or Korean, or Central Asian, or Thai, or White, or a combo of the above, or whatever impacts their experiences and the fallout. The reader is not being taught a lesson, the reader is being generously given a lens into the lives of other people, and has the opportunity to build empathy.
That subtlety is the thing I think I most liked about this book. A central character who pops up fairly late in the book uses they/them pronouns. That is it. No one comments, there is no discussion of how they identify or assignment at birth because it is not relevant. At some point the reader learns about that person's genitalia and the sexual partners and acts they do and do not enjoy because this character, whom we have come to know for their competence and generosity begins having sex with another character. Everything I mention should not be a big deal, but it is because I do not think I have read another book that featured a trans and/or nonbinary character where there was not discussion of their assigned gender and their precise gender identification. Here it was just a fact, just as it is something not discussed for people on the gender binary. Another example of this subtlety was in professional evolution. The main character has earned a degree in finance at a NY school and worked in that industry in what is implied to have been a very well-compensated postion with an upward trajectory. At some point that changes and he ends up doing manual labor, both skilled and unskilled. Why that changed is never discussed, no one asks him if he is returning to finance and no one asked why he left. Maybe it is because of the trauma that is one of the central foci of the book, maybe it happened way before that. We do not know. And that might be a great story, but it is not the story Washington is telling, and he does not get caught up in explaining it for the reader. We can choose to not think about it, or we can bring ourselves to the tale and create our own backstory, or we can just wonder. That is up to us, but Washington is not doing if for us. I love books where that space exists for the reader to imagine parts of the story. Modern writers often feel the need to fill in all the blanks. I am glad Washington does not feel that way.
One last note: I have railed before about GR reviewers' issues with writers not using quotation marks. If it is done well it is only confusing if you choose to be confused by it. This is not a new thing. James Joyce, for one example, loathed quotation marks and basically argued they were there to give authors control over readers' reading pace and immersion level. Still, a lot of readers seem to lose their shit over this. So I am hear to warn you, this book has no quotation marks. There is a lot of conversation and it feels (clearly intentionally) as if the reader is a step removed from those discussions, as if they are being told second hand what was said. If that bothers you, do not read the book.
I ended between a 4 and a 5 because the ending seemed uncharacteristically clean and unsubtle with a bit of "the moral of the story is" about it. I chose to round up to a 5 because that mostly bothered me philosophically, it did not really diminish my enjoyment, and it was just a few pages out of the whole. I recommend this wholeheartedly for all except those people with a deep and abiding love for quotation marks.
This is my third Bryan Washington book (to the best of my knowledge that is everything he has published) and it revisits many themes and concerns of earlier works. In some interesting ways it creates a bridge between the two earlier books, Lot and Memorial (or maybe Memorial is a bridge between this and Lot - I have to think on that.)
This is a book about living through grief and recovery from grief (both fresh grief and past grief that creates the foundation upon which we process new grief.) This is a book about self-destruction and self-preservation, both in relation to grief response and not. This is a book about love, in so many forms, familial (by birth, circumstance, or choice), romantic, and radical love for those who touch our lives even fleetingly and whom we can meet in many differnt ways. This is a book about cultural disconnects, especially for people of mixed-race and those who grow up in non-bio families where they have different ethnic/racial identifiers than than the other family members. This is a book about sex and all the things it can mean and not mean. (Other reviews mention a lot of cheating, which is untrue. People are non-monogamous by agreement, everyone respects the agreed upon ground rules. That is not cheating. There is only one person here who we know is cheating, a closeted man who is engaged to a woman and secretly having sex with men.) And this is a book about food, about the pleasure and pain it can bring, about how it is a way to show love, deny love to ourselves, and to find a substitute for love through overindulgence. Certainly it is also a book about racism. These people are who they are, in part, because of their cultural connections and their presentation. Some concern themselves with taking up less space, with not being seen, some have more anger and fear in common everyday interactions. Some BIPOC characters forget for a moment how the White people see them and that forgetting brings life-changing consequences. There is no "racism is bad" soliloquy. Rather there are people living, and the fact of living while Black or Korean, or Central Asian, or Thai, or White, or a combo of the above, or whatever impacts their experiences and the fallout. The reader is not being taught a lesson, the reader is being generously given a lens into the lives of other people, and has the opportunity to build empathy.
That subtlety is the thing I think I most liked about this book. A central character who pops up fairly late in the book uses they/them pronouns. That is it. No one comments, there is no discussion of how they identify or assignment at birth because it is not relevant. At some point the reader learns about that person's genitalia and the sexual partners and acts they do and do not enjoy because this character, whom we have come to know for their competence and generosity begins having sex with another character. Everything I mention should not be a big deal, but it is because I do not think I have read another book that featured a trans and/or nonbinary character where there was not discussion of their assigned gender and their precise gender identification. Here it was just a fact, just as it is something not discussed for people on the gender binary. Another example of this subtlety was in professional evolution. The main character has earned a degree in finance at a NY school and worked in that industry in what is implied to have been a very well-compensated postion with an upward trajectory. At some point that changes and he ends up doing manual labor, both skilled and unskilled. Why that changed is never discussed, no one asks him if he is returning to finance and no one asked why he left. Maybe it is because of the trauma that is one of the central foci of the book, maybe it happened way before that. We do not know. And that might be a great story, but it is not the story Washington is telling, and he does not get caught up in explaining it for the reader. We can choose to not think about it, or we can bring ourselves to the tale and create our own backstory, or we can just wonder. That is up to us, but Washington is not doing if for us. I love books where that space exists for the reader to imagine parts of the story. Modern writers often feel the need to fill in all the blanks. I am glad Washington does not feel that way.
One last note: I have railed before about GR reviewers' issues with writers not using quotation marks. If it is done well it is only confusing if you choose to be confused by it. This is not a new thing. James Joyce, for one example, loathed quotation marks and basically argued they were there to give authors control over readers' reading pace and immersion level. Still, a lot of readers seem to lose their shit over this. So I am hear to warn you, this book has no quotation marks. There is a lot of conversation and it feels (clearly intentionally) as if the reader is a step removed from those discussions, as if they are being told second hand what was said. If that bothers you, do not read the book.
I ended between a 4 and a 5 because the ending seemed uncharacteristically clean and unsubtle with a bit of "the moral of the story is" about it. I chose to round up to a 5 because that mostly bothered me philosophically, it did not really diminish my enjoyment, and it was just a few pages out of the whole. I recommend this wholeheartedly for all except those people with a deep and abiding love for quotation marks.
Read
December 10, 2024“Ainda assim, notei uma grande evolução, não apenas na escrita, mas também na forma como temas pesados como o luto são retratados. Gostei especialmente que Bryan Washington continuasse a explorar formatos diferentes com a sua escrita, dependendo da personagem cujo ponto de vista acompanhamos.”
Review completa em: https://ritadanova.blogs.sapo.pt/fami....
Review completa em: https://ritadanova.blogs.sapo.pt/fami....
December 30, 2023
The first 80-ish% of this book feels very hollow, which I suppose matches the character experience. The characters interact with varying degrees of meanness to each other. There are endless hookup descriptions that are so perfunctory in nature that I almost tuned them out by a certain point. Again, this mirrors something about what the characters are experiencing, and the act of filling a void for at least one of those characters. Even so, that doesn’t really make for a great read. The last 20% starts to showcase interactions that feel more emotionally substantial, but it’s a really long time to wait. I was ready to give up on the book so many times before that point.
November 26, 2023
I loved this book. It’s such a beautiful story about love, grief and family. I loved reading from each characters’ perspectives. This book covered some pretty difficult topics, while still feeling warm and homey. It was clearly a labor of great love.
July 9, 2023
This was not a book for me. I struggled with caring for or about the characters, and characters were the whole point of the book. It just missed the mark for me.
December 2, 2023
0 stars ⭐️ No seriously, NEGATIVE stars
I picked this up without reading the synopsis because it was nominated for a Goodreads choice award in the first round and I generally try to read as many of those books as I can.
WHAT A MISTAKE
This is scattered, formless, stream-of-consciousness rambling. It is gay porn fiction and deals with themes like depression, self harm, drug use and destructive behaviors.
Extremely woke in content, but also very badly written, this is easily the worst book I have ever wasted my precious time on. Thank God I got this from the library and didn’t buy it. Do yourself the biggest favor and skip this one immediately- reading the dictionary would be more edifying than this absolute dumpster fire.
I picked this up without reading the synopsis because it was nominated for a Goodreads choice award in the first round and I generally try to read as many of those books as I can.
WHAT A MISTAKE
This is scattered, formless, stream-of-consciousness rambling. It is gay porn fiction and deals with themes like depression, self harm, drug use and destructive behaviors.
Extremely woke in content, but also very badly written, this is easily the worst book I have ever wasted my precious time on. Thank God I got this from the library and didn’t buy it. Do yourself the biggest favor and skip this one immediately- reading the dictionary would be more edifying than this absolute dumpster fire.
November 4, 2023
I HATE books that do not use standard punctuation!!! Why can't you use quotation marks? Its not cute, or modern, or ground-breaking. Its just irritating & laziness.
It's not particularly impressive that you know how to use the F word. If you remove all the F words, this book would be 20 pages shorter! If your purpose was to show how difficult it is for young gay males to find their way to responsible adulthood, I think you failed.
It's not particularly impressive that you know how to use the F word. If you remove all the F words, this book would be 20 pages shorter! If your purpose was to show how difficult it is for young gay males to find their way to responsible adulthood, I think you failed.
November 10, 2023
I’m no prude but this book was just pornography without substance, style, or story.
December 20, 2023
almost burst into tears reading the last line of this book
November 6, 2023
(3.5) After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
(I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…)
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”
(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”
“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”
“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai���s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
(I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…)
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
December 2, 2023
Unfortunately the plot was not in the room with us. Meh!
March 1, 2024
could've done with 50 pages less, a shame as I loved the first two parts. rtc
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