A novel about two young men who grew up together, fell away from each other, and then collide again after a crisis…Growing up, TJ was Cam’s boy next door. When Cam needed a home, TJ’s parents took him in. Their family bakery became Cam’s safe place… until he left. Years later, Cam’s world is falling apart. The love of his life is dead and Cam’s not sure he’s ready to let go of him, but when he has a chance to return to his home town he takes it. Back in the same place as TJ, they circle each other warily, TJ unsure how to navigate Cam – utterly cool, completely devastated and self-destructive – crashing back into his world.
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. Memorial is 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
In the city of Houston -- a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America -- the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He works at his family's restaurant, weathers his brother's blows, resents his older sister's absence. And discovers he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra. Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home.
