Family Meal is Texas author Bryan Washington’s second novel, following a book of short stories and a well-reviewed debut novel, Memorial, exploring the end of an interracial gay love affair, a parent’s death and one character’s search for his roots.
Here, Washington takes up similar themes. Family Meal is set mainly in Houston, Texas, where the central character, Cam, is living a dissolute life of extreme drug-taking, self-starvation and compulsive, anonymous sex after the death of his partner, Kai. A childhood companion, TJ, comes back into his world, nursing complicated feelings about him and about the past. Dead and distant family abound: Cam’s parents died in a car crash, while TJ’s Korean father, Jin, also died and Kai was estranged from his parents.
