Family Meal: A Novel

Written by Bryan Washington

Narrated by Bryan Washington, André Santana and Jake Choi

"Achingly and beautifully etched. . . 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."—The Washington Post

An irresistible, intimate novel about how those know us longest—even when they hurt us most—can also set the benchmark for love, from the National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of Memorial and Lot

The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets—a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time— the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780593789223

Bryan Washington

Bryan Washington is the author of the story collection Lot and the novels Memorial and Family Meal. A National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree, he is the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and an O. Henry Prize, and he has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, and the James Tait Black Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, his writing has also appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Time, GQ, and Esquire, among many other places. He is based in Tokyo.

Reviews for Family Meal

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Realistic story about love, grief, and food.

[carltonc_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was a bit in-your-face for me, but I like the author’s voice, and it provides an insight into a completely different world. There is casual drug use, as if it is normal, and casual queer sex, which was used by Cam as if trying to numb the pain of losing someone, unsuccessfully.
I enjoyed the book, but I think that Washington was attempting to achieve too much significance at the end from too little. I like a book that makes you work, and this did make me work as there was a lot of new information, but the rather obvious messages at the end seemed, well, obvious, and disappointing.

A story from three points of view:
• Now living in Houston again, Cam is attempting to live with the memory/ghost of a significant other (Kai), whilst he works in a bar and is generally offensive, batting away offers of help.
• Kai, a translator of Japanese, who comes from Louisiana. The photos in this section really make it standout, which is just as well, as Washington uses exactly the same style/voice for this character.
• TJ, Cam’s childhood friend and foster brother, who has his own path to development.

[hccpsk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After the horrific death of his boyfriend, Kai, Cam returns to his hometown of Houston where his oldest friend, TJ, finds him wallowing in drugs, alcohol, and anonymous sex. In Family Meal, Bryan Washington digs into the despair of grief, family secrets, and self-doubt, but also mines the healing depths of family, friendship, and forgiveness. Told through a variety of POVs with Washington’s precise and witty language, Family Meal is an excellent novel for readers of literary fiction.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 different 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 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 position 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 asks 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 here to warn you, that 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 secondhand 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 Goodreads 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.