This was a book that I think would be incredibly improved by having the copy with the additional images in. Despite that I should say that this is an interesting, if slightly too slowly paced, book about a friendship and a death and the immigrant experience.

With the caveat that I read this on a weirdly formatted NetGalley epub, I liked reading Stay True, Hua Hsu's memoir of his youth, his friendship with Ken, and Ken's eventual death in a horrific violent incident. Some of it really worked for me: the more straightforward memoir aspects, the evocation of 80s and 90s California, the exploration of the immigrant experience, the romantic but still real descriptions of being young and in college and really into music. But some of it didn't: mainly the philosophical musings and the slight disjointedness and the bits about Derrida. I would read more by Hua Hsu, though: he's a great writer. And what a really horrible thing to have happened. Thanks to @picadorbooks for letting me read this via @netgalley!

Stay True by Hua Hsu is a memoir that powerfully explores themes of male friendship, grief and identity.

Hsu's voice is both insightful and accessible, making Stay True a compelling read fluttering between the nuances of identity and authenticity during a period of upheaval and youthful grief. a deeply moving and tragic story that was both beautiful and heartfelt.

This book is an intellectual account of an awkward coming-of-age, friendship, loss, and eventually healing. I couldn’t relate to the author’s core interests, but enjoyed his portrayal of the 90s. That time, not so long ago, when the Internet wasn’t so widespread and was hardly monetized. Long passages of telling and narrative distance distracted me somewhat from the otherwise beautiful portrayal of love between friends and shattering loss.

'Stay True' is a beautiful and devastating memoir about friendship and grief. Hua Hsu recounts in unflinching detail his friendship with Ken as a student at Berkeley and then his feelings of grief and guilt after Ken is murdered in a carjacking incident.

This is a relatively slender volume but is full of honest observations and reflections. One strand of the book I found interesting was his comments on growing up as an Asian American whose parents who both came to America from Taiwan and who resist total assimilation ("You were free to name your children after U.S. presidents. Or you might name them something unpronounceable, since they would never be president anyway.") His experiences contrast with Ken's - Ken's family is originally from Japan but are far more assimilated.

Writing over twenty years after leaving Berkeley, Hsu shows an unusual degree of self-awareness about his younger zine-producing self who is forever seeking out alternative tastes ("I saw a bad CD collection as evidence of moral weakness"). His friendship with Ken is surprising because of their many differences, but becomes very close, and Hsu intimately traces the contours of this friendship and the "presumption of reciprocity" that exists between them.

The final chapters of the memoir detail Ken's death and Hsu's response to this, including his unquestioning feeling of guilt. This makes for painful but powerful reading, and again, the time that Hsu has taken since these events to recount them adds to the clarity with which he can describe them.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this immensely moving book to review.

I am not normally a memoir lover but I really enjoyed this one. We follow Hua Hsu from his isolated childhood growing up in California with his father back in Taiwan communicating through fax, growing up feeling like an outsider and building an identity and a shield through pop culture, through to his going to Berkley and building friendships, discovering ways different people move through the world, learning about philosphy and ideas of friendship and growing up. He seemed like kind of a dickhead as a teenager and uni student, the way everyone is a dickhead from 16-23, and the humour but also fondness with which he wrote about this younger self was really warm and moving. Ultimately, it is a memoir about grief and identity, and while I had spent the first half feeling it was good if slightly self indulgent, waiting for the other shoe to drop, when it finally did it really hit me. It came back around emotionally,. lending a pathos to the earlier part of the memoir that made it very moving and ultimately made me cry (a rare event with books).

This has been quite an anticipated read for me, as I have heard nothing but great things about this memoir, and I really liked the sound of its focus on a blossoming friendship cut short in such a formative time of someone's life. Seeing that it has since won the Pulitzer Prize spurred me to finally pick this up, and I am so glad that I did. Hsu's narrative voice is so strong that it transports you to his time as a college student at Berkeley, and it feels as though you are fully immersed in his friendship group and his conversations with his friend Ken, talking about everything from films to philosophy and everything in between. The grief felt at losing his friend in such a brutal and unexpected way is palpable, and the ways in which he carried his friend with him in the years that followed were beautiful. This was such an incredible testament to a friendship, not only for what it was but for the potential of what it could have been.

Stay True is a difficult one to review.

Hsu’s loss is a tragedy for all involved and his recollection of the time was very upsetting. I am sorry to hear of his experience.

There were some beautiful sentences and insights within the memoir. The pages were brimming with nostalgia, I enjoyed remembering with Hsu.

I think the trouble I had with Stay True was that it held the reader at a distance (understandably!). However, this meant it was hard to connect with the story. I also felt, for me, the pacing was off - we revelled in the self-indulgent, juvenile period for a bit long without seeing the developing relationships or development of self. Perhaps there are further memoirs by Hsu to follow?

Pick this book up if: you enjoy memoir, or stories 90s adolescence

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I feel like I read a different book to everyone else. This isn't a terrible memoir, but I'm astounded that it's from a New Yorker staff writer and won a Pulitzer Prize.

First things first: Stay True claims to be about Taiwanese-American Hua Hsu's friendship with Japanese-American Ken, how they both negotiate their relationships with American culture, and how Hsu copes when Ken is senselessly murdered. But most of this memoir isn't about Ken, and the parts that are focus more on Hsu's grief than on their friendship, which feels remarkably short-changed. To an extent, this is the publisher's issue rather than Hsu's issue, but it did make the book feel unbalanced to me, as Ken never feels like a significant presence when he's alive, and yet it comes to centre around his loss.

This, for me, points to a bigger issue I had with Stay True: how remarkably self-centred and blinkered it feels. I don't think I've ever called a memoir self-centred before, as it seems like a weird criticism; of course memoirs are self-centred! But this feels like it was written by a stereotype of a university student who is obsessed with liking the right music, making zines and telling the reader every single thing he thinks as he tries to work out the meaning of life. I don't think most students are actually like this and I was also surprised that the older Hsu didn't impose some perspective. It is tremendously difficult to interweave memoir with wider insights about the world, so I respect what Hsu was trying to pull off here, but I felt like I was back in a bad undergrad seminar.

It makes sense, then, that the stronger chapters of Stay True, for me, are the early ones, where Hsu writes about his relationship with his parents and histories of Asian-American activism. Here, it reminded me of Ryan Lee Wong's excellent novel Which Side Are You On, which also deals with a family legacy of Asian-American activism in California, though from Korean-American and Chinese-American perspectives. Hsu unpacks his relationship with his parents beautifully through the faxes his father sent him when he was working back in Taiwan, and there are also some nice moments later on - for example, when Hsu tries to play out a stereotypical immigrant narrative by thanking his parents for moving to the US for his sake, and they tell him they were only too glad to leave Taiwan. But this is all explored much more interestingly and perceptively in Wong's novel.

It feels, in a way, like Hsu's loss of Ken was so traumatic that he's still stuck - at least when writing this book - in the same space he was back then, which is completely understandable from a real-life perspective, but didn't work for me as a memoir. I loved what Hsu quotes from his journal near the end about not only missing Ken but missing earlier eras of grieving him - 'I miss missing you circa Oct 98' - and I wondered if this was a way of reinhabiting those earlier eras. Nevertheless, this has obviously resonated with other readers far more than it did with me.

A moving memoir of friendship and grief. I could tell that the author is a journalist because there was a factual tone throughout.

Thanks ever so much to @picadorbooks for sharing this title with me on @netgalley!

Stay True by Hua Hsu.

Hmm. Did we all read the same book here? Am I going mad? Okay, let's start with the good stuff: if you're looking for an atmospheric, West Coast vibe-y, 90s-fuelled memoir, then this will be your thing. And, truly, it was my thing too! To begin with, at least. I felt so connected to Hsu's experience of high school, listening to alternative music, wanting to fit in... and I loved the feelings of nostalgia it evoked, reminding me of my own school days as a teenager.

Now, for the bad: everything else. Vibes will only take you so far. Once Hsu goes to college (university), I started to lose interest as our experiences began to diverge and I found it near impossible to connect with him. His friendship with Ken, what should be the central theme throughout this book, seems very one-sided and we never really get to know Ken in as much depth as I would have wanted to. Instead, the memoir is overwhelmingly focused on Hsu's experiences and I'm not sure he's the best or most reliable of narrators.

Ken's untimely death occurs very late into the book and it's jarring to see how little time is devoted to exploring Hsu's grief. There were moments where I found myself thinking 'Jeez, does he even care?' He himself even admits to his therapist that he might be too self-centrered towards the end, when he finally realises he might need therapy and... well, thanks for saying it so I don't have to!

Ultimately, I just couldn't get on board with his approach to life and I wish we could have learnt more about Ken, who genuinely sounded like a fantastic guy. Stay True fell flat.

I found it tricky to sum up my thoughts about this one. Not because it isn’t good, because it really is, but because it’s also a tough and reflective read.

Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir packs a punch, and covers so much. It’s very much a coming of age story, covering his college years. He depicts the righteous anger one has in their late teens and early twenties so well. He mentions ‘zines’ and driving to the video rental store, and paints a nostalgic picture of a time before social media and mobile phones. But it also grapples with racial identity and the concept of model minorities, and navigating the world as a 2nd generation immigrant.

Most importantly, however, it is a tribute to his friend Ken, who was murdered in the summer break before their senior year. He lays out his grief, and doesn’t hold back. It’s a hard read, and gets quite raw, but Hsu also articulates what is often so hard for someone who is grieving to come to terms with - ‘Surrendering to joy wouldn’t mean I was abandoning you’.

Ultimately, it’s a beautiful and tragic love story about friendship, and it’s well worth a read.

When Hua Hsu was a student at Berkeley in the 1990s one of his closest friends, Ken, was attacked in a car park. Forced into the trunk of his own car by three people, at least one holding a gun, Ken was driven around while his attackers tried to use his credit cards to get cash. Then they drove Ken to an isolated place where they shot him in the head, abandoning his body in an alley. Hua Hsu’s fluid, intimate memoir is his attempt to make sense of the senseless, a random act of violence and a particularly brutal reminder of the precariousness of existence.

Up until that point, Hsu’s energies were centred on forging his own identity, a process of testing various waters in ways that conjure a variety of conventional, coming-of-age narratives. Hsu’s parents were from Taiwan but met in America, where they settled and raised their son. Far from the stereotypes so carelessly applied to Asian American parents, Hsu’s family was supportive and nurturing. Although, as a Taiwanese American, Hsu was acutely aware of difference from an early age, difference became something he actively embraced: gradually defining himself through a series of oppositions, invested in the explicitly “countercultural” from producing his own zine to wearing vintage clothing to rifling through out-of-the-way, record shops in search of the obscure or neglected.

By the time Hsu arrived at Berkeley, he was inwardly uncertain but outwardly poised, outspoken about his tastes and his beliefs, disdainful of the mainstream or the mass-produced. So, when he met Ken, it was more a case of opposites repel than attract. Ken seemed intent on blending in, with his baseball caps and Abercrombie and Fitch outfits, and his outspoken following of mainstream bands. One of Ken’s first acts as a student was to join a fraternity. But, Ken and Hsu are also connected through the shared label “Asian American” despite Ken’s vastly different experience as a descendent of generations of Japanese Americans. And then through a series of unexpected, shared moments, Ken and Hsu became friends.

Hsu tells their story in a way that admits vulnerability but avoids melodrama or sentimentality. He interweaves more personal elements with ideas he first encountered as a student so, for example, Derrida’s writings on friendship frame his thoughts on how bonds develop between individuals and groups. It’s a tried-and-tested approach popularised by writers like Maggie Nelson and Cathy Park Hong, but Hsu’s sincerity and immense skill as a writer make it feel surprisingly vivid and fresh. It’s also an interesting way of reinforcing the enormity of Hsu’s loss, the vast divide between the theories we adopt to interpret and delimit the world around us and the ultimate, unfathomability of events like Ken’s murder.

An exquisite memoir about adolescence and grief. Hua Hsu meets Ken at Berkeley and at first he doesn't 'get' him. They are like chalk and cheese. Hua is earnest and lost in the wilderness of 'finding himself'. He works studiously at what it is to be a young man. Ken fits into his skin with seeming ease and a lightness of touch that Hua is both attracted to and repelled by. As the young men spend time together their friendship grows and it becomes something important to Hua. After a party, when Ken is murdered, Hua's life begins to fall apart and only make sense in relation to his lost friend. This is a meditation on grief and what it means to lose so much. It is also a wider exploration of identity of second generation immigrants and their place in society. Hua is forced by the absence of his friend to examine his own life and what it means to him.

Friends to lovers read. A easy, paced read that I enjoyed. It'll make you happy and sad and wanting to keep reading.

This was a bittersweet memoir; the writing had me captivated and Hua Hsu writes with an honesty that that felt like I was actually there. He brought Ken to life so thoroughly that I felt I knew him too. A beautiful and moving memoir that I couldn't put down

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Hua Hsu had carefully curated an identity based on musical taste, thrift shop clothing and a deeply ingrained sense of moral superiority by the time he’d enrolled in Berkeley. Ken was the opposite - open, friendly and mainstream – everything Hsu despised, yet over time a friendship grew opening up a world of intimacy and ease for Hsu. The night of Ken’s party, Hsu is hoping to sleep with his girlfriend for the first time, eagerly leaving the apartment, expecting to talk to Ken the next morning. After several anxious days, Ken’s body is discovered in an alley. Their circle of friends is poleaxed but it’s Hsu who adds a burden of guilt to the grief and shock experienced by them all.

Hsu’s memoir begins with his childhood experience as a second-generation immigrant, relatively at ease with the language and culture he’s brought up in yet conscious of his parents’ difference. In contrast, Ken’s Japanese American family is well established, yet both are beginning to explore their identities within a country that is not wholly accepting of them, seeing race in terms of Black and White. Hsu is self-deprecatingly humorous about his youthful self, mildly outraged when Nirvana achieves mainstream adulation, no longer the niche cult band he’s taken up. There’s an immediacy and joy in his memories of student parties, confidences exchanged and ideas tossed earnestly around in the age of mixtapes, zines and chatrooms which makes Ken's murder all the more shocking. His poignant memoir ends with his final therapy session at Harvard when he promises his therapist he’ll write about all they’ve discussed one day. Over twenty-five years later he has, and most eloquently so.

❛Words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean. Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.❜

I heard someone the other day talking about how they prioritise living with meaning over living for happiness; as though the one often comes with the other but through meaning you’re cultivating a place for yourself amidst the chaos.

Don’t get me wrong- be greedy with any pocket of happiness you can find and hold onto it. But after hearing that understanding, something shifted into gear and moved me when reading Stay True in this so called ‘causality’.

❛Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” ❜

Like many, learning new words is one of the best units of joy that transpires from reading books. And a word that vehemently sums up the contours of Stay True is: telos; a Greek word that defines along the line of a ‘moral purpose in life.’

Hua Hsu shares a story that transports you into the freedoms of youth- the imperceptible highs of friendship, of safety and place- that cycles us into adulthood, into a new found reality but roots us to an index full of possibility, some of the most liberal uninhibited times and truly being seen.

From finding his own identity as a freshman- with distinct music taste, dress sense and political call - to befriending Ken, an instrumental confidante and soul who was lost too soon - the overall rhythm of Hua’s catharsis is a meditation on memory and the ‘apothecary’ of grief through immortalising moments to page.

Stay True is a textured and considerate homage. It is “an unending dialogue between past and present.” It touches on the gentleness of our parents- their way of showing love, of communicating with us, their asking of “what do you think” tethering us to opine; to resolve or evolve.

Shoutout to friends here, there and everywhere 🧡