“There’s one film, Yi Yi, that follows a family in Taipei over the course of a year,” Washington says. Washington mentions that one of his biggest influences are the films of the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang. Moreover, his stories came wrapped in a fast, pedestrian prose style all his own, one that eschews ornate flourishes and meaty metaphors for a tough, off-the-cuff intimacy that cuts and flows like the Houston heat. Washington, instead, tackled race, queerness, poverty, crime, gentrification, and the difficult bonds of friends and family. Last year, Washington made a literary splash with the publication of his short-story collection, Lot, a radical, multidimensional examination of the lives of everyday Houston citizens that went well beyond the white, straight, cowboy demographic most readers commonly associate with Texas. I’m much more comfortable in quieter spaces and in quieter moments.” “Whenever I try to make a big declarative statement, my head freezes up. “Those very quiet concerns are what I’m significantly more interested in,” says the 27-year-old, Houston-based author. The thrill of Washington’s writing isn’t the way he guides his characters toward some rupturing realization, but rather how they manage to squeak by, through a thousand tiny moments of love and violence, in the day-to-day reality of living. Each character is struggling to find their place in a messy, complicated, unpredictable world.

That’s your issue right there.” This volatile exchange is as close as Washington gets to diagnosing the existential crisis at the heart of his fictional universe. “I don’t really think it’s my place,” the young man says, to which the tenacious mother responds, “That’s your problem… Both of you. At the end of Bryan Washington’s mesmerizing debut novel, Memorial, a long-suffering, no-nonsense mother asks her son’s boyfriend to explain the intricacies of a troubled relationship.

Bryan washington memorial