Family Meal: A Novel

Lambda Literary Award Winner, 2024

“Achingly and beautifully etched … Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters—and readers—an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope, and nourishment.”
—The Washington Post

The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam's life, won't leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family's bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets—a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time—the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about how those who know us longest—even when they hurt us most—can also set the benchmark for love.