A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARA GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, O, the Oprah Magazine, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub“A masterpiece.” —NPR “No other novel this … Reviews, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub
“A masterpiece.” —NPR
“No other novel this year captures so gracefully the full palette of America.” —The Washington Post
“Wryly funny, gently devastating.” —Entertainment Weekly
A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.
Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson’s a Black day care teacher, and they’ve been together for a few years—good years—but now they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. There’s the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.
But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike’s immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.
Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they’ve ever known. And just maybe they’ll all be okay in the end.
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Bryan and I had a joyous conversation for A WORD ON WORDS about love, food, travel and family–all the things his debut novel is about–and then some. What a great book, and what an intriguing author! I predict we are going to see much more of Mr. Washington over the next decade.
Memorial is a tour de force, truly unlike anything I’ve read before. Bryan Washington’s take on love, family, and responsibility is as complicated and true as life itself. I can’t stop thinking about it.
The book is written in a style to match the characters personalities. The relationship dynamics are thorough and deep even if they are a world apart.
I look forward to more works by this author.
Memorial is the latest novel from award-winning Texas writer Bryan Washington, a dramedy about two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson’s a Black day care teacher. They’ve been together for a while, but now they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. When Mike’s mother arrives from Japan and tells him his father is dying from cancer, Mike bolts for Japan, leaving reluctant Benson to live in an odd-couple situation with Mike’s acerbic mother, Mitsuko. Benson and Mitsuko learn to tolerate each other while Mike learns more about his father than he ever thought he could while helping him run his bar in Osaka.
This entertaining and heartfelt novel is told in three parts: a first-person section told by Benson, another first-person section told by Mike, and a final section told by Benson again. Both characters give funny and insightful takes about their families and their relationship to each other as well as the other partners that come into their lives while they are apart. Mike and Benson both come from damaged families and that damage is what keeps them from communicating to the fullest extent with each other, each still protecting their own hearts even after a few years of being together. Mike’s part about going to Japan to be with his dying father was especially affecting, their relationship examined and kneaded into something resembling forgiveness, truths mined from feelings hardened through the loss of time. When Mike and Benson’s two stories come back together in the end, there is at least a hopeful possibility that their love for each other will continue while their families attempt to mend their damaged lives.
This being said, this novel is not perfect. There are a couple of stylistic quirks that were annoying. First, this novel incorporates a recent literary trend to abandon quotation marks. Some authors use this better than others and, in this book’s case, it’s just slightly annoying. But the second quirk is more egregious: carriage returns within spoken dialog. Here’s an example:
Then she said, That isn’t your home.
Ma said, We’re here now. This is your home.
The “she” here is Ma. Washington employs this annoying narrative speed bump extensively, mostly in the two Benson sections. Especially in conjunction with the lack of quotation marks, I found myself constantly going back in the Benson sections and rereading huge chunks instead of just flowing with the story. Once Mike’s section moved into page-turner territory, it’s was because this technique was mostly dropped. But sometimes, just like having a great friend who constantly asks to borrow money, an annoying quirk can be overlooked as just annoying.
Ultimately, the character development in this novel was phenomenal and the dialog between all the characters was funny, true-to-life, and well done. When Mike and Benson came back together in the third section, it’s hard not to cheer for them and their families. Forgiveness is a powerful thing. Washington wrings our hearts to full-effect in this funny yet moving novel.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it. I would give this novel 4 and 1/2 stars.
Bryan Washington’s Memorial was incredibly well received by critics and even gained praise from Barack Obama. When books get glowing reviews, it always makes me a bit wary, wondering whether they will be more style over substance. Not so with this novel. Yes, it is stylish but written in a very contemporary way, mostly in quickfire, witty, and often emotional, dialogue.
The two main protagonists may be gay but this is far more substantial a story than to be pigeonholed gay fiction. It is essentially about family, love and death and they are universal themes. Black guy Ben is in a relationship with Japanese Mike. What follows is a trawl through their relationship but is also intertwined with how they both relate to their families.
This could have been a meandering tale, because not a great deal happens, but the writing feels so fresh, the subject matter totally re-imagined for the 21st century. Memorial manages to be both funny and heart wrenching, a very difficult feat to pull off that surely sees this as a new great American novel for our times.
Interesting premise but I struggled to get through this. Not sure why it made best of 2020 loss.
Heart-wrenching and beautiful.
Memorial is a true page-turner. I was entranced, picking this book up every chance I got. Bryan Washington is a great writer and I love the story he tells here. Intriguing. Each character stays with me.
Memorial dares to insist on the mundane, thoroughly lived life as a site of perennial hope, joy, and abundance. It casts a fresh take on the American family that becomes truer because of its disparate origins, the queerness of its genesis, and the buoyed wonder it finds in surviving grief and loss towards the rare and forgiving ground of difficult, hard-won love. All of this done in sentences clean and clear as cut glass. This book, in what feels like a new vision for the 21st century novel, made me happy.
I was entranced by this deeply original and wholly absorbing novel. Bryan Washington creates characters who are complex, interesting, and three dimensional, and made me care about every single one of them. This book made me think about the nature of love, and family, and anger, and grief, and love again.
Brilliantly details the smallest moments that mean the absolute most, the heartbreakingly human limitations of how we love one another, and with all its many roommates and zip codes and implications, Memorial beautifully rests in how difficult it is to ever truly go home.
Bryan Washington’s Memorial is stunning. Everything happening in this book is so intimate, sensual, and wise. It is a funny book with much sadness and love. It is a story about relationships, and family, and what it means to have and not have home, in Houston, Texas, and in Osaka, Japan. It is also a surprising page-turner. The scenes and characters here couldn’t be more alive and vivid. I love this book.
Bryan Washington is an expert in illuminating the way we love. Memorial perfectly captures the lives lived in-between what we do and what we say, what we need and what we allow ourselves to have. It is a beautiful heartbreak.
Tender like a bruise, Memorial is a novel of uncommon depth and feeling. It is about everything that matters in life: love, loss, community and communion. Bryan Washington will take your breath away.