Novelist Bryan Washington Talks About Showing Up, Growing Up, and Morning-After Omelets
The award-winning author of "Memorial" and "Family Meal" contemplates the nature of home when you're all grown up.
- Bryan Washington discusses his novel Memorial, family dynamics, and the importance of food in relationships on Food & Wine's Communal Table Podcast.
Bryan Washington Talks About Growing Up, Showing Up, and Morning-After Omelets
This is Episode 85 of Food & Wine's Communal Table Podcast and originally aired December 3, 2020. Catch up on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and follow Food & Wine's current podcast Tinfoil Swans on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On this episode
Bryan Washington 's extraordinary novel Memorial shares the story of two men in love and at a crossroads in their four-year relationship, when some family dynamics shift and they have to reevaluate who they are in the world, and to one another. There's also a ton of great food on every other page. Washington joined Communal Table on a call from Houston, TX to talk about the care and feeding of loved ones, writing a place for himself in the contemporary fiction landscape (it helps when Barack Obama is already a fan of your work), and what holidays look like in communal isolation.
Meet our guest
Bryan Washington has been named to the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 list, and as one of Forbes' 30 Under 30. He has received the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, an Ernest J. Gaines Award, an International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Lambda Literary Award recipient (twice), the James Tait Black Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Goodreads Choice Awards, and the O. Henry Award. He has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. He was a columnist for the New York Times Magazine and his fiction appears in The New Yorker .
Washington is the author of the story collection Lot , and the novels Memorial and Family Meal . Learn more at brywashing.com .
Meet our host
Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves , host of Food & Wine's Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans , and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing . She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.
Highlights from the episode
On finding home — for now
"For a long period of time I lived in a suburb just outside of Houston and my parents actually moved away from there in the recent past. But before they moved, I was there pretty often, like once or twice a week or so. You see the different versions of yourself that happen in it. In a lot of ways that forces you to take stock of the ways in which you've changed one way or another. When that place changes — like when home changes, just as a geographic point — I feel like it forces us to really reckon with what home is. What home can mean? Whether it's a specific person, whether it's a place, whether it's a group of people, or whether it's just a feeling that you can take with you. You can have multiple homes perhaps, or home can take another form."
Related: Make Bryan Washington's Oxtail Stew
On giving thanks
"I've had very warm Thanksgivings, which is a massive privilege as a queer person specifically. Some have been spent with family — blood relatives — and others with found family, friends, and friends of friends, and acquaintances who've since become friends. More often than not, my Thanksgivings and my adult life have been centered around just the gratitude of the day. I think that the general vibe has been one that isn't stuffy. My friends and I have gone out of our way to create an environment, whether it is somebody's apartment, a Friendsgiving, or a K-barbecue joint. I had a Friendsgiving two years ago that was at a cafe in Houston where no one could make it in the afternoon, no one could make it in the evening. So we just had late-night travels to the café. It was one in the morning and it was a really lovely celebration of each other, and gratitude, and the ability to have time with one another. It's certainly something I'm thinking about this year when all of us are siloed. What's really been heartening is the ways in which folks are finding points of connection. They feel deeply necessary. They're always necessary but it feels especially exacerbated this year at the end of a very difficult year for any number of reasons, both personal and infrastructural, and macro."
Related: Bryan Washington on the Magic of Oxtails
On cooking for love
"A good chunk of the pleasure of meals together is in the sharing of it, and then the sharing of it from the same dish, and the ability to reach across the table immediately. And to spoon into someone else's bowl, right? Or to share a look of glee when they perhaps it's something in the flavor profile that they have before. Like watching their face when they eat something that you like and there's a moment of like, 'Are they going to like it or not?' When they do, it's a beautiful thing. Like, top five thing.
I don't know how often are there moments where we can see how it changes someone in real time. Food is really important for me. With my partner right now, it is something that we both share and it's actually a conversation that we've had before. Sharing is a non-negotiable — or something that's developed over time and is now a non-negotiable. It's the care taken with them in that particular moment. It's certainly something that I found means a good deal to me. [With morning-after meals] I think it's important to have this understanding that like, 'OK, this was the evening that we had, now we're going to give each other comfort through this other shared thing.'"
About the podcast
Communal Table was a podcast that ran on Food & Wine for 100 episodes from March 2019 to April 2021.
Read the original article on Food & Wine
