This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I’m recommending Family Meal, by best-selling and award-winning author Bryan Washington.
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 are wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of TJ, his former best friend, and TJ’s family bakery. TJ’s not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, who is 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?
Family Meal juggles a lot within its pages—hard choices, roads not taken, addictive behaviors, self-forgiveness—yet you can feel the intention and artistry in each word, sentence, and paragraph the author has crafted for this story. And at its core, Family Meal is about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set our standards for love.
With a discerning eye for the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington’s writing about family is some of the best I’ve ever read. He imbues such vulnerability and complexity into his characters, and the dialogue is so well-written and authentic. But don’t just take my word for it. When critiquing his writing, The New York Times Book Review said, “What makes Washington’s writing about family so refreshing and complex is how he shows the ways people attempt to demonstrate the emotions they otherwise have trouble expressing to the ones they hold dear.”
Check out Family Meal and other moving works of fiction like it at the Sioux City Public Library.
Support for Check It Out on Siouxland Public Media comes from Avery Brothers.
