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love is a tangible thing. It is palpable. You can hold it in your hands. You can see it in the air. You can breathe it in and hold it and push that shit right back out of your lungs. When it dissolves, you might not see it, but that won’t mean it wasn’t there. Because you were.

EDIT: Congratulations to Washington for winning the Lambda award for best gay fiction.

This is a book that leaves me befuddled. I want to love it but it doesn't seem to care if I do. It's a story that straddles the line between tender and tragic, like a bruise. Family Meal struggles to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, Memorial, one of my favourite books of all time. Unlike Memorial with a clear vision, Family Meal is like an abstract mosaic. It requires the reader to distance themselves further and further until they get a clear picture. But this story doesn't get clearer, it gets austere.


Fine Art America

We start with Cam, a young man who has recently experienced a great tragedy. One which is drip-fed until its details are suddenly revealed. Cam is haunted, literally. He was having drug-induced conversations with the ghosts of loved ones past. He is lonely, tortured. Afraid of healing. His was my favorite narrative in the entire book. I had hoped the whole book would be about him. In one of his conversations, he's told, Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai. Cam is taking chicanes to avoid processing his loss. He's focusing on everything wrong with the ether. He does struggle with how to approach his issues.

I think about telling Minh what’s been going on, with __ and the dreams and the drugs and the fucking and how everything feels like it’s smothering me at once, like I’m fucking suffocating from the weight of myself.

Cam felt like every time I've ever failed to pick up the phone and utter the most difficult word of them all, "help".

Cam was also the best part of this book. In his , Nell Stevens says, "To read is always to experience a haunting, to be alone while in the company of another consciousness, to receive messages from a person who isn’t there." Cam experiences this physically. He's lost in the miasma of melancholia. He sought drugs not to weaken the strength of his feelings but to keep feeling lost. At one point, I keep going until the night swallows me whole because it’s something to fucking do.

In him, I saw my pain, my despair. Some self-made, some circumstantive. And I would have liked to spend more time with someone so... relatable. But there were other stories to be explored. Kai, the effervescent translator who refused to be tied down by roots, and TJ, the baker who seems unmoored. Kai is a Black translator, a role I've never read about before but would love to see more of.

If you’re Black and you’re a translator then people look at you funny. They get this fold right over their nose. You can’t see it unless you’re looking for it. But if you’re looking for it, you can’t unsee it.

For him, the most important thing was connection. A right to explore, expand. And his mother and sister struggled with his need to fly away.

My family taught me the difference between acceptance, allowance, and understanding. Also: just being. Sometimes they overlap. Usually, they don’t.

Eventually, Kai had to set sail, which his sister resented him for. In this way, she was a translator, too. We misread each other.

Finally, we spend time with TJ. A baker who is HIV+ and wondering where his place in life is. He's involved with a closeted man who treats him like an accessory. Worse, an appendage. Something vestigial and hidden. But TJ can't help himself and he can't explain why. He is Cam's oldest friend and their friendship is one that is push-push. Cam pushes TJ away and TJ lets him. Some people set the key of their lives inside you and simply turn.

TJ's existentialism is almost relatable. His story isn't as tragic as Cam's, dare I say, not as entertaining. , "lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?� Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?� It can also be expressed thus: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?�" It's a good thing that TJ is a baker, because one of the cures to this is epicureanism, at least according to Tolstoy.

TJ is also dealing with loss, ambiguous and empirical. When Cam went through his tragedy, he left TJ. Refused to look for him, reach for him. TJ was heartbroken and when Cam returns in his life, they struggle to regain their footing. They were dance partners. Cam went off beat then left the floor. TJ doesn't care to tangle any more.

He is struggling with identity. I didn’t want to explain or justify. I didn’t want to be accepted or tolerated. I wanted to just be. He doesn't want to hurt others. There’s no way not to hurt anyone, says Emi. Even if you really try. You’ll only end up burning yourself. He remains existential Isn’t living a terminal condition?

Ultimately, this book is about the healing power of shared meals. It's about how friendships, relationships, complex human connections are essential to other peoples' well-being. As I observed in my review of The Memory Police , you can measure your impact on the impressions you leave on others. The negative space created by your memory. Family Meal asks you to consider the roles that other people play in your life.

With every single person we touch, we’re leaving parts of ourselves.

All the philosophers, such as the seminal Chris Cornell, said to be yourself is all that you can do. And you can only live for yourself, your goals, your dreams, your plans. In my culture, we originally lived in homesteads and communes. We existed for each other. Everyone contributed to the well-being of the homestead through their role, regardless of age and gender. Capitalism has erased this symbiosis and narrowed us to cogs working tirelessly to fill the coffers of greedy leaders and business owners in exchange for housing, healthcare and survival. The things that give us joy are stolen moments. Stopping to smell the roses is radical. Family Meal takes this message, turns it inside out and tells you maybe you should live for others.

I struggled with my rating for this book. But the more I think about it, the more I love it. Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t. Ultimately,

It takes all of these people to make one person’s life okay. One person can’t do it for you by themselves.

Washington also says it in his , " Capacity is a really interesting way of thinking about it because one of the components that was really important to me was taking each of these characters and seeing what care looked like for them, which is to say: What forms of care do they need? What forms of care can they provide? And how would they change themselves and their senses of care to take care of those around them? Whether it’s a friend, a romantic partner, someone in between, whether it’s family. One of the questions that felt central to me in regards to care was the role that it can play in friendship, and the ways in which that care can change over the years inside of a friendship." Have you cared to make someone ok today?