Bryan Washington on Family Meal, inspiration and asking questions

It’s an approach which has led him to three books, and a whole heap of just recognition. A writer whose fiction and essays have appeared in all the places you’d want your writing to appear –  including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Vulture and the Paris Review – Washington’s first book Lot was published in 2019. A collection of short stories set in his native Houston, Lot earned Washington the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and subsequently the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Lot was followed a year later by Washington’s debut novel, Memorial. A tender story about love and how we both convey it and navigate its unfamiliar paths, Memorial also didn’t go short of recognition. It was named a New York Times Notable Book as well as being longlisted for the Aspen Literary prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. 

And now comes book three, Family Meal, which Washington joins us at the Southbank Centre as part of our London Literature Festival to launch. Family Meal introduces us to TJ and Cam, two young men, once best friends, whose lives are brought back together following a loss. The book follows their stuttering, awkward reconnection, exploring the unsaid, in 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, and by their necessary presence, create a family.

Ahead of Washington’s appearance here at the Southbank Centre, in conversation with fellow author Mendez, we caught up with the author to ask him about inspiration, influence and food as a literary device.

Did the success of Lot make it easier to write your first novel, Memorial, and subsequently Family Meal, or did it bring additional pressure?

Insofar as there's pressure, it stems from my wanting to do the best job of telling a story that I can at a given point in time. Between that, and not embarrassing my friends, my hands are pretty full.

What inspires you to write, and do you have an established method for coming up with ideas for new stories?

I'm deeply interested in questions; particularly questions without easy answers, like, what is home? How many forms can a family take? How does queerness shift our pre-existing structures, or what we may think of as being essential to our lives? And what possibilities can queerness yield? But I'm hardly looking to actually answer these things – doing that would be disingenuous anyway. There are as many end points as there are people and contexts, all of which are constantly shifting. This can make living through them challenging – but, narratively, it's a boon. 

Who are your literary influences?

Jesmyn Ward, Banana Yoshimoto, Samantha Irby, Ocean Vuong, Park Sang Young, Helen Oyeyemi, Yaa Gyasi, and Alejandro Zambra are very important to me. There are many more folks. 

As with Lot and Memorial, your home city of Houston serves as the setting for Family Meal. Is it a case of writing what you know, or is there another motivation in wanting to commit the city to the page?

It's a mixture; I'm always fascinated by the many different forms that home and community can take, as well as how they continually shift. Houston's diversity across many different stratums makes it an excellent setting for parsing those themes.

Like Houston, food has also played a significant recurring role in your writing, and (as the title suggests) features prominently again in Family Meal. What is it that attracts you to food as a subject and also, in many ways, a literary device?

I'm interested in food insofar as it's an entry point for other conversations, about community, class, bodies, labour, and pleasure. It's a useful device in that it serves as a pretty accessible shorthand; sustenance, to some degree, plays a role in each of our lives.

You’ve previously spoken about a driving factor for Memorial being to write a novel where the question was not ‘do the two people in this couple love each other?’ but ‘how do these two people navigate being in love with one another?’ Did you take a similar approach with Family Meal? Was there a driving question that framed your navigation of TJ and Cam’s relationship?

I was curious about how we navigate queer relationships (romantic, platonic, the rift in between) when we may not have pre-existing models for those structures. Cam and TJ have love for one another, even though they don't quite have the language at hand to express it. But they'd still like to show up, and be present, and in community for the folks they care about. The journey to figuring out how they do that was a north star for me. 

Family Meal is a book that’s often driven by its dialogue, despite much often being left unsaid by its characters; how hard is it to convey the unspoken on the page?

It's challenging, but also a fairly large component of trying to bring the text to as close of a simulacrum toward lived experience as possible. Quite a lot of our communication is unspoken. I'm really interested in the creases between those moments.

What do you hope readers will take from Family Meal?

If reading the book brings someone closer to what brings them pleasure, or to take active steps in seeking out that pleasure, then I'd be pretty happy. 

by Glen Wilson