Bryan Washington

“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).… (meer)

“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.… (meer)

Editing to add that after reading some other perspectives on this novel and thinking about them I have a better appreciation for Memorial, Mike and Ben make a bit more sense to me. Still not a favorite but it’s better than my initial rating.

Memorial asks the reader to care about the future of the relationship between partners Benson and Mike, which I found difficult to do for several reasons. The biggest of these for me is that Washington never shows us why these two should be together in the first place. Their relationship is abusive and dysfunctional from the start of the novel, neither seem very happy in it and it seems the best reason for it still being a thing is that Ben can't afford to move out. Presumably they were a happy couple at one time, but we don't get that and it leaves me thinking hell yeah, Ben, go explore a relationship with Omar; hell yeah, Mike, move to Japan. What's the counter-argument here, exactly? Glad we got that suspenseful conundrum resolved.

Secondly, it's hard to perceive much difference in the personas of Ben and Mike. Washington writes them in a similar, almost exact, voice. This makes it hard to see them as individual fleshed-out characters.

Another problem I had with the writing beside a failure to differentiate the character's voices is the way Washington writes dialogue, like it's a constant Socratic exchange, which becomes exhausting to read. Here's three examples taken from just a short section of the novel when I first decided to note it, to illustrate the point:

What kind of guy did you think your son would end up with, I say.
Is that your real question, says Mitsuko, or are you asking something else?

Hey, I say, when are you coming home?
That's the question, isn't it, says Mike.

Later, once he's left, she asks me what's wrong.
Why does something always have to be wrong, I say.

Can't you people just have a regular question-and-answer conversation?! Maybe this is an individual irritation though, I don't know.

What should be a common reaction on the part of the reader though is, "Wait, Mike's mom flies to the US from Japan to visit him for the first time in many years, he doesn't tell her he's leaving for Japan himself the very next day(!) to see his dying father and doesn't know when he's coming back, and so his mom stays and lives in his apartment with his boyfriend who she's never met for weeks and weeks, not knowing when he's ever coming back?" In what world does this happen?

As you may surmise, I had some problems with this novel.… (meer)