Bryan Washington: Family Meal
Join Bryan Washington, the bestselling, Dylan Thomas Prize-winning author of Memorial and Lot, at the London launch of his new novel.
Washington appears in conversation with Mendez about Family Meal, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.
Growing up, TJ was Cam’s boy next door. When Cam needed a home, TJ’s parents, Mae and Jin, took him in. Their family bakery became Cam’s safe place – until he left, and it wasn't anymore.
Years later, Cam’s world is falling apart. The love of his life, Kai, is gone, but his ghost keeps haunting Cam, and won’t let go.
When he has a chance to return to Houston, his hometown, Cam takes it. Back in the same place as TJ, they circle each other warily, drawn together despite past and current drama, their banter electric with an undercurrent of betrayal.
Family is family. But TJ is no longer the same person Cam left behind; he’s had his own struggles. A quiet, low-key, queer kid, the one who stayed home, TJ’s not sure how to navigate Cam – utterly cool, completely devastated and self-destructing – crashing back into his world.
This 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, and by their necessary presence, create a family.
Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His fiction and essays have appeared in, among other publications, the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the BBC, Vulture and the Paris Review. He’s also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, the recipient of an Ernest J. Gaines Award, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, the recipient of an O. Henry Award and the winner of the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize.
Mendez (they/them) was born in the Black Country, a historically industrial region, in 1982. Raised in the Jehovah's Witness faith, they left the organisation while still a teenager, and later began sex work while studying acting at a North London method school. Journaling their experiences eventually led to a novel, Rainbow Milk, which was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Polari Prize. Their essays and reviews have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry Foundation, Attitude and The Guardian.
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For ages 16+
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