A Letter from the Editor: Family Meal, Bryan Washington
‘taking care of ourselves is taking care of the people we love, and taking care of the people we love is taking care of ourselves’
Dear reader,
Bryan Washington is gathering a reputation as one of the wisest, funniest, most serious and most sensual writers at work in the English language. His debut collection, Lot, won the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020, and his first novel, Memorial, a gay slacker dramedy about two young men falling in and out of love, became an immediate US bestseller. Family Meal, his next outing, only burnishes that reputation, a tragicomic heartbreaker of a novel about found family, ghosts, queer friendship and food.
Growing up, TJ was Cam’s boy next door. When Cam needed a home, TJ’s parents took him in. Their family bakery became Cam’s safe place until they catastrophically fell out and Cam took off, no looking back. Years later, Cam’s world is falling apart. The love of his life is dead and Cam’s haunted by his memory, so when a bar job comes up in his home town – the only place in the world where there might still be some people who love him – he takes it. Back in the same place as TJ, they circle each other warily, Cam unsure how to talk about all the things left unsaid, TJ unsure how to navigate his oldest friend – utterly cool, completely devastated and self-destructive – crashing back into his world.
For a whole bunch of reasons, I love this book. It’s tough, honest, funny, sexy, traumatic, generous, and it has a really smart emotional philosophy of mutual accountability, one that reminds us that taking care of ourselves is taking care of the people we love, and taking care of the people we love is taking care of ourselves. It’s also brilliant on male friendship, on platonic love, on food and sex and on ghosts, and there’s a moment of stillness towards the end that moved me so much that my bones felt soft, and moved one of our publicity directors so much that a woman on the train had to ask if she was okay. I think it’s a major book on contemporary America – both fierce critique and, in some ways, love letter – but also a major celebration of found family, the small but vital group of folks we pull around ourselves who have our backs, no questions needed.
Thanks for reading this letter. I hope you might be half-persuaded to visit a bookshop, take away Family Meal, sit yourself somewhere comfortable, and dig in.
Yours,
James Roxburgh
Publishing Director, Atlantic Books
