Stay True

Winner of Pulitzer Prize in MemoirA Best Book of the Year: New York Times, Vogue, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, TIME, Rolling Stone 'One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith’s Just Kids’ The AtlanticWhen Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music, Ken seems exactly like everyone else. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to – the mainstream. The only thing Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the US for generations, have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.Capturing a coming-of-age cut short, and a portrait of a beautiful friendship, Stay True is a deeply moving and intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come, Quietly wrenching . . . This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion — all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life, A luminous and tender-hearted story. . . Stay True is a nuanced and beautiful evocation of young adulthood in all its sloppy, exuberant glory, [Hsu writes] with devastating emotional precision, questioning the possibility of meaning in tragedy and the value of the stories we tell while attempting to find it . . . an extraordinary, devotional act of friendship, A beautiful memoir that goes deep into the heart of friendships

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of Literature at Bard College. Hsu serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family.

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