This book was a bit in-your-face for me, but I like the author’s voice, and it provides an insight into a completely different world. There is casual drug use, as if it is normal, and casual queer sex, which was used by Cam as if trying to numb the pain of losing someone, unsuccessfully.
I enjoyed the book, but I think that Washington was attempting to achieve too much significance at the end from too little. I like a book that makes you work, and this did make me work as there was a lot of new information, but the rather obvious messages at the end seemed, well, obvious, and disappointing.

A story from three points of view:
• Now living in Houston again, Cam is attempting to live with the memory/ghost of a significant other (Kai), whilst he works in a bar and is generally offensive, batting away offers of help.
• Kai, a translator of Japanese, who comes from Louisiana. The photos in this section really make it standout, which is just as well, as Washington uses exactly the same style/voice for this character.
• TJ, Cam’s childhood friend and foster brother, who has his own path to development. ( )

“With every single person, we touch, we’re leaving parts of ourselves. We live through them” (301).

This is a book about the sweet and sour of life. It’s about the place we call home and the people we call family and how both of those help us overcome the sour of life—things like overwhelming grief and stubborn addiction.
After traumatically watching his husband die, Cam returns home to Houston, a place with which he has a complicated past, including a best friend who was more like a brother. Through the the tunnel vision of grief, which includes Kai’s ghost visiting Cam routinely, Cam learns to continue living while also reconciling some demons from his past. Like all stories about emotionally dark places, this is hard to read in certain spots, but it’s also a really beautiful story of friendship and learning to love after loss.

“What did you want him to hear, I say. Bree looks at me. She smirks. That destroying himself wouldn’t make anything better, says Bree. That makes Cam cough. I don’t have to look at him to see the tears falling down his face. Kai’s, dead, says Bree. That’s never going to change. But I need Cam to know that his life wasn’t just his own. I need him to know that there was someone else who fucking cared about him” (271). ( )

“With every single person, we touch, we’re leaving parts of ourselves. We live through them” (301).

This is a book about the sweet and sour of life. It’s about the place we call home and the people we call family and how both of those help us overcome the sour of life—things like overwhelming grief and stubborn addiction.
After traumatically watching his husband die, Cam returns home to Houston, a place with which he has a complicated past, including a best friend who was more like a brother. Through the the tunnel vision of grief, which includes Kai’s ghost visiting Cam routinely, Cam learns to continue living while also reconciling some demons from his past. Like all stories about emotionally dark places, this is hard to read in certain spots, but it’s also a really beautiful story of friendship and learning to love after loss. ( )

Cam and Kai are a couple, it happened, perhaps to their surprise, and they are enjoying it until the death of Kai. This leads Cam to a drug-fueled, sex-addicted, food-denying life of grief. And then an old friend, TJ comes back into his life and it becomes even more complicated or simple depending on how you view life, family and its relationship with food.

One of the major themes in the book is recognising when you are loved and what is done out of love. Anything can be misinterpreted - concern seen as being too involved, wanting to know someone better as asking too much, not telling someone something as a desire to cut them out and then being completely surprised when they come to rescue you.

I enjoyed the changing perspective of the narrator from Cam to TJ and then Kai. Each person filled in some of the gaps in the story and more and more is revealed but in a very sparse form of writing. Cam is haunted by his dead partner Kai and some of their discussion take place in small snippets, each having its own page, floating in the middle but accentuating what is said. I also loved the photos that were included of the flowers, cherry blossom and streets although I am not really sure what they add to the story.

No punctuation for the dialogue is not a hinderance - sometimes it can be. The convention of new speaker, new line is followed so it isn't all one big blob of words that you have to work hard at delineating speakers. What I am less sure about is what it adds or takes away from the telling of the story. Does it make the dialogue more a part of the narration? Thinking about how it would look on the page I can imagine that the amount of speech punctuation you would need for this book would take away some of the sparesness of both the writing and the appearance on the page.

The families are many, fluid and cook, all extremely well, knowing where the equipment is and moving around each other in a dance. It brings them together with the cooking sometimes being payment for accomodation, as a favour to a friend who may become more, and as sustenance. It is very symbolic that Cam denies himself food in grief.

A book to tuck into. ( )

After the horrific death of his boyfriend, Kai, Cam returns to his hometown of Houston where his oldest friend, TJ, finds him wallowing in drugs, alcohol, and anonymous sex. In Family Meal, Bryan Washington digs into the despair of grief, family secrets, and self-doubt, but also mines the healing depths of family, friendship, and forgiveness. Told through a variety of POVs with Washington’s precise and witty language, Family Meal is an excellent novel for readers of literary fiction. ( )