Books like Memorial

Normal People by Sally Rooney follows Connell and Marianne through their entangled relationship from an Irish secondary school to Trinity College Dublin. Like Memorial, the novel is built on the accumulation of small moments between two people who cannot quite make their relationship work despite genuine feeling on both sides.

Rooney and Washington both write dialogue that reveals more through what is left unsaid than what is spoken, and both treat the domestic scale of a relationship, the meals, the silences, the physical proximity, as sufficient material for serious fiction. The class dynamics in both novels shape the characters' behavior in ways they do not fully recognize: Connell's working-class background and Marianne's wealth create asymmetries that mirror the racial and cultural differences that complicate Benson and Mike's relationship.

Both books also resist the conventional romance structure, refusing to organize their narratives around whether the couple will stay together and instead asking what staying together actually requires.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong takes the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, interweaving his coming-of-age as a queer man with his family's refugee history and a first love shadowed by addiction. Like Memorial, the novel treats queerness and racial identity not as separate subjects but as inseparable dimensions of how its characters move through the world.

Vuong's prose is more lyrical and fragmented than Washington's understated realism, but both authors share an attention to the physical details of intimacy, food, bodies, landscape, that grounds their emotional arguments in sensory experience. Both novels also center on the relationship between a queer son and a parent from a different culture, showing how love persists across gaps in language and understanding.

Washington and Vuong both write about men who cook for the people they love as an act of communication that goes beyond words.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney follows two pairs of friends and lovers through email correspondence and third-person narration as they try to figure out how to live meaningfully in a world that feels increasingly absurd. Like Memorial, the novel treats the mundane mechanics of adult relationships, texting, cooking dinner, navigating silences, as the real substance of emotional life.

Rooney and Washington both write about couples who are unsure whether they should be together, and both refuse to resolve that uncertainty with a dramatic gesture or a neat ending. The email exchanges in Rooney's novel serve a similar function to Washington's alternating chapters: both techniques allow the reader to see the same relationship from two different angles, revealing the gap between what each person experiences and what the other understands.

Both books are also set in specific, carefully observed physical environments that anchor their emotional abstractions in real places.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara follows four college friends in New York across three decades, with the narrative increasingly centered on Jude and the people who refuse to abandon him despite his self-destructive patterns. The connection to Memorial lies in both novels' insistence that love between men, whether romantic or platonic, deserves the same narrative seriousness traditionally given to heterosexual love stories.

Yanagihara's novel operates at a much larger scale and higher emotional intensity than Washington's, but both authors write about the daily work of caring for someone whose needs you cannot fully understand. Both novels also resist sentimentalizing queer relationships, showing instead how love between men is shaped by the same forces of class, race, family expectation, and personal history that complicate all human connection.

Washington's tone is quieter and more restrained, but both books achieve a similar honesty about the limits of what one person can do for another.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee follows four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, where they face persistent discrimination while building lives around work, food, and family loyalty. Like Memorial, the novel treats food preparation and shared meals as a primary language of love, particularly between people separated by culture, generation, and the inability to say directly what they feel.

Lee and Washington both write about families that span cultural divides, showing how each generation inherits the silences and compromises of the one before. The scale is vastly different, Lee covers nearly a century while Washington stays within a single year, but both authors share the conviction that the most important things in a family happen at the kitchen table.

Both novels also write about characters who are outsiders in the places where they live, and both treat that outsider status with specificity rather than generality.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro follows Stevens, an English butler, as he takes a road trip through the countryside and reflects on his decades of service at Darlington Hall, slowly revealing the personal life he sacrificed for professional devotion. Like Memorial, the novel is fundamentally about the things people cannot say to each other and the consequences of that silence.

Ishiguro and Washington both write about characters who express love through service and duty rather than declaration, and both treat that indirectness not as a flaw but as a legitimate emotional language with its own grammar and costs. The cultural contexts are different, an English country house versus a Houston kitchen, but both authors share an understanding that restraint is not the same as absence of feeling.

Both novels also build their emotional power through accumulation, creating a slow-building recognition that the characters have missed something essential in their pursuit of what they thought mattered.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett follows twin sisters from a small Louisiana town who end up living in very different worlds, one passing as white in California, the other remaining in their Black hometown. Like Memorial, the novel is interested in how racial identity shapes intimate relationships and family dynamics in ways that the characters themselves do not always recognize.

Bennett and Washington both write about interracial couples navigating the specific pressures that come with crossing racial boundaries, and both treat those pressures as structural rather than merely personal. The dual narrative structure in both novels allows the reader to see how the same events look different from different perspectives, revealing the limits of any single point of view.

Both books also share a matter-of-fact tone about race in America, treating it as a daily reality that shapes everything from where people live to how they love rather than as an abstract social issue.