Bryan Washington On His New Novel, Queer Representation and the Ecstasy of Food

Three years ago, when Bryan Washington started sporadically tapping out the earliest draft of Memorial on his phone’s Notes app — while waiting for dinner to simmer, or between teaching ESL classes— he envisioned the self-proclaimed “queer traumedy” as a short story with limited appeal. After all, there wasn’t exactly a robust market for a fraught love story between a Black daycare teacher named Benson and a Japanese American chef named Mike that traversed Houston’s Third Ward and the back alleys of Osaka. Especially one, says Washington, “with no clear cut resolution that's not trying to teach anyone anything in particular.” But eleven drafts later, six pages blossomed into his debut novel, published by Riverhead on October 27. A24 has already purchased the rights, with Washington set to write the adaptation for television.

Lot, Washington’s 2019 debut story collection, performed a similar feat: spotlighting the oft-ignored lives of Black and Latino Texans to commercial success and critical acclaim. Hopscotching percussively through Houston’s East End -- a molting constellation of sex workers and shotgun apartments with swollen pipes --Washington animated the hurts and desires of his young protagonists, who were mostly queer and always searching. Lot went on to win the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction, and was selected by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year.

Memorial conjures a similar texture, by turns brutal and tender. The story opens with a comical chasm of crossed wires: Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, visits him in Houston from Japan just as Mike is preparing to visit his ailing father in Osaka. Disgruntled, Mitsuko stays with Mike’s boyfriend, Benson, in their one bedroom apartment. Awkwardness ensues. Silences, and the weight of what can’t be said, punctuate nearly every relationship— Mike and Benson, Benson and Mitsuko, Mitsuko and Mike—though where words fail, food prevails. There’s H Mart natto and “seafood curry swimming with scallops and shrimp, just waiting for rice,” congee with a sliver of fish and a bowl of instant noodles “blanketed by some sliced cheese.”

Early on, after watching Mitsuko “mash the potatoes and pork through her fingers” for a potato korokke, Benson tells her it’s the most personal thing she’s ever shared with him. Her response? “Don’t be stupid.”

The morning after the A24 deal was announced, GQ spoke to the 27-year-old writer about movies, publishing, and food.

GQ:First things first, congratulations. Did you spend the night celebrating?

Bryan Washington: Not really, because on our end [the deal] was finalized back in August, but it was still really nice to share it with folks. It's cool that folks were so excited about it. 

Do you have a dream cast in mind?

Ideally, so many of the roles will be discoveries. I feel like when I'm writing fiction I might have a certain archetypal actor in mind who would play a certain role. But for Memorial I really didn’t have someone in mind who would play Benson or Mitsuko or Ximena, so I think that's really exciting. That was certainly a sticking point when [my agent] Alice and I were talking to folks about this— being open to casting widely.

You’ve mentioned movies playing a big role in your writing process, in terms of watching the same scenes over and over again to get a sense of the emotional resonance. What were some of the films that informed Memorial? And was the book written with the intention of being adapted?

I don't know that I would say that was ever my intention because frankly, for the longest time I did not think [Memorial] would sell. I just didn't know that there was any literary market for it, let alone something on the screen. But because so much of my early narrative education was through watching film, I wasn't really pigeonholed into thinking a story should only be one kind of way. It just really opened up a world as far as story was concerned for me, even if I didn't know that at the time. It also made me hyper-conscious of the way that folks move around the space on the page, which is something that was really helpful generally, but definitely for this particular book where there was so much silence, and so many unsaid things.

Girlhood and Spa Night were really important, Moonlight was really important. Still Walking, this [Hirokazu] Koreeda film—the way that folks moved around food and the way so much of the film takes place in a handful of rooms and yet in one of those rooms there's a handful of worlds. Also this film called Yi Yi by Edward Yang really informed how I perceived narrative, as far as trusting an audience, a reader, and not having to spell everything out for everyone. You can just build the best people that you can and let the story do the rest.

It was so refreshing to read a queer interracial relationship that completely ignored whiteness.

Generally, I'm not really taken to write with white people in mind, and that's made for some interesting interviews from time to time. White folks will be like Where is your explanatory comma? or How am I supposed to know what this particular thing means? and I'm just like you should turn to fucking Google or pick up a fucking book like everyone else has to all the time. I just wasn't interested in writing about Benson and Mike's relationship in comparison to whiteness, or refracted off of whiteness, or as it contrasts to whiteness. There are moments where they certainly talk about it, and talk about race more generally, but I didn't want it to be a plot point because I just wasn't interested in reading that. It was really important for me to write about communities that were in conversation with themselves.

Memorial is told through dual perspectives: first from the perspective of Benson, who is Black, then from the perspective of Mike, who is Japanese. What goes into successfully writing from the perspective of someone who’s of a different ethnicity or background than your own?

It was important to me to give them equal time on the page, especially when approaching some of the same moments from different angles. When writing Mike specifically, what was on the forefront of my mind was just, how do I write a complete person? I think that’s going to be difficult irrespective of who you're writing about, whether or not they are from your immediate community. If you are trying to think through who this person is on the page, then you are constantly questioning: What is their community? What does community mean for them and how do they conceive of themselves within their particular community? What is the history that their family had to navigate in order to make it to whatever geographic point they're at?

You have to be conscientious of those questions regardless of who you're writing about, but even more so when you're writing outside of yourself. For me, an overarching thing is I have so many friends who are coming from communities that I'm learning about, and you don't want to embarrass them. You want to write the best iteration possible, and you want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt to the best extent that you know how, and that means doing research and talking to people and just writing as many drafts of the thing that you can until you get to the clearest iteration.

Winning the Lambda Literary Award canonizes you within a lineage of queer literature. To what extent do you think about writing into or against that lineage?

My main concern at any given point, whether that’s super short fiction or a novel, is how do I create a world on the page in a way that is as similar to life as it's actually lived? It might not be at the forefront of my thinking, but it's also true that what I'm writing and the reception that it's getting would not be possible if other folks didn't open those doors or push the stone a bit further— to not only create a market but to create an interest and an opening. I think if there is any lasting good from the visiblity that Lot got, it's that hopefully when someone else is trying to sell a novel that features queer characters from marginalized communities that aren’t capitalizing on their marginalization, they're able to do that because then there will be a comp. Lot sold and did what it did and there were comps for Lot and now Lot is a comp for other folks. After Memorial is released Memorial will be a comp people will refer to. I think there is power in that because ideally the next person who writes their thing throws the stone a bit further and it will keep getting pushed along as far as we're able to get it going.

I've heard multiple people in publishing say that as a queer Asian writer I need to get in before the gate closes. On one hand, I’m grateful that more stories are being told. One the other, I sometimes feel like a data point on a publisher’s diversity spreadsheet. Do you think there’s an expiration date to this expansiveness in publishing?

It's really a negotiation. I am not confident saying there is an expiration point because I think we’ve seen so much change in publishing this summer, specifically as white people in this country seem to be having their own specific reckoning and realizations with race. As far as #publishingpaidme was concerned, a lot of those conversations were brought about by brute force. I think that a lot of the change that needs to happen— in addition to publishing folks who are writing from marginalized backgrounds—are in the mastheads themselves. That's where a lot of lasting change happens, when you have publicist and publicist assistants and editors and folks on design teams and folks in marketing from marginalized backgrounds. And certainly when you have folks on the top. It's going to require an overhaul, and it's not an overhaul that's going to happen overnight. It only happens when there's increased pressure from all sides.

I thought Memorial would be a book that four people would read on their phones and apparently it's not. One thing I was really fortunate a friend told me early on was not to write terribly intently with the market in mind because the market doesn't know what it wants until the market wants it. The market didn't know it wanted Lot and then Lot happened and that seems to be occurring for Memorial too.

I was first introduced to your work via your food writing for The New Yorker. You’ve since written about everything from curry pan to George Floyd’s funeral— do you consider yourself a journalist? And to what extent does your lens as a non-fiction writer inform your fiction?

I didn't really conceive of myself as a food writer until people started calling me a food writer. I consider myself someone who is interested in narrative, and whether or not those narratives are rooted in fiction or not, it’s about following the thread to the end of the final questions I might have. The idea and presence of story is what's most interesting to me. The really cool thing about coming up in Houston and living here is most everyone here is a storyteller in some capacity. Even if they aren't a specialist, even if they aren't explicitly monetizing it, the folks who work at my barber shop or the pawn shop or the autobody shop I go to have hella stories, and most of them are better than mine. So it's just a question of form for me, irrespective of whether it's fiction or nonfiction. And even if I do have a question that I'm looking to play with or extrapolate, I’m never really interested in answering it. If I do answer it at the end of the piece then that's quite alright, but in the case of Memorial it was just question after question after question and that's also quite alright.

The food in Memorial is such a source of comfort. What have you been cooking during this stressful time?

Really simple stuff, tomatoes and eggs dishes and casseroles. There was a period when I was having kimchi fried rice very, very often. Now that it's safer, now that we know a lot of the terms of the virus itself, I bake stuff for friends and drop them off.

How old were you when you started cooking?

I started cooking in earnest in middle school. The kitchen was a place where I felt comfortable. I knew after a time that I could bring pleasure to folks I cared about from the things that I made: tarts, pastries, pies, and puddings. You know, just a little queer baker in middle school. I didn't think it was part of my identity, just something I did repeatedly. Even though my neighborhood was deeply white, the suburb I lived in was really diverse, so I was constantly privy to a lot of different cuisine, whether that was going over to our Filipino neighbors’ place, or going over to our Cuban neighbors' place, our Iranian neighbors' place. Just seeing the way food could bring people together was really formative for me, even if I couldn't have articulated exactly at the time.

Do you remember the first time you gave someone pleasure through food?

I made pecan tarts for my neighbor and her son, who was a friend of mine, and I remember this face they made when they bit into it. They were just kind of like, Oh shit. I didn't really recognize it at the time. That was a nice feeling.

Originally Appeared on GQ