Episode description

This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to award-winning American writer Bryan Washington about his moving novel Memorial.

Benson, a Black day-care teacher and Mike, a Japanese-American chef, live together in Houston, but are beginning to wonder why they're a couple. When Mike flies off to visit his seriously ill, estranged father in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother arrives for a visit, Benson is stuck looking after his boyfriend’s mother, in a very unconventional domestic set-up. As both men cope with their difficult circumstances they undergo life-changing transformations, learning more about love, anger, and grief than they had bargained for along the way.

Poignant and profound, Memorial is about family in all its strange forms, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the outer limits of love.

(Picture: Bryan Washington. Photo credit: Louis Do.)