Join Books Inc. Berkeley in welcoming New Yorker writer and professor Hua Hsu in conversation with bestselling author Tommy Orange for a thrilling discussion about Hsu's critically acclaimed and widely anticipated debut memoir Stay True!
A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken 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 textbook 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.
Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since.
Featured on Kirkus Reviews' "150 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022"
Featured on Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2022
Featured on The Millions' Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2022 Book Preview
Featured on the Boston Globe's "20 New Books We're Most Excited To Read This Fall"
Featured on New York Magazine's 57 Books We Can't Wait To Read This Fall
Featured on the Los Angeles Times' 10 books to add to your reading list in September
"Hua Hsu offers, with seeming effortless grace and lucidity. . .a map to his soul's becoming. He shows how he constructed an armor against the injustices of the world, one made only of porousness and transparency, the only armor worth donning. This kind and degree of sharing is a rare gift." --Jonathan Lethem, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn
Deep feelings coursed through me as I read Hua Hsu's story: Grief, nostalgia, pity, terror, mercy... Stay True is a crucial, sense-making, healing book. -- Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
I was softly heartbroken by Stay True, which is an elegy not just for a friend but for so much else that feels lost and irreplaceable--a time of tender idleness and unmediated presence, a way that it was once possible to be young. The things that make Hua Hsu's writing so singular--his searching grace, his rigorous sensitivity, his ability to make a living world out of the seemingly liminal--crystallize in this once-in-a-lifetime book. --Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
In this elegant, open-hearted elegy for his fallen friend, Hsu does the labor of love, of taking time to recall and make record of the quotidian detail of another man's life. In this way, he reveals for us all how aesthetics are products of both relationships and of terrible loss. The river of this memoir is quiet and deep, unassuming, it enters the reader and changes us with its capacity for connection. --Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show
"'I was a storyteller with a plot twist guaranteed to astound and destroy, ' Hua Hsu says of himself, in a tone that is slightly ironic. And yet what he has achieved in Stay True is exactly that: to astound and destroy his reader. This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come." --Rachel Kushner, two-time National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
Hua Hsu's Stay True is a rich, intelligent, and beautifully crafted portrait of just about everything that matters in life. Here is friendship, art, and family cast against a distinctly American backdrop of migration in language so precise and subtle that you might not even notice how it breaks and mends your heart. --Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
In crafting Stay True, Hua Hsu has opted to trust the consequential size of memories shared with Ken over what we readers feel we are owed. The result is one of the finest memoirs I've ever read. --Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
New Yorker staff writer Hsu braids music, art, and philosophy in his extraordinary debut. . .Hsu parses the grief of losing his friend and eloquently captures the power of friendship and unanswerable questions spurred in the wake of senseless violence. The result is at once a lucid snapshot of life in the nineties, an incredible story of reckoning, and a moving elegy to a fallen friend. --Publishers Weekly *starred review*
Stay True feels like one of those books that is the sum total of a writer's life in thinking, craft, and curiosity, made felt at last, so that when the sentences come, they come with a deliberate, patient, and precise force. Hsu takes on the central theme of a friend's violent loss and casts from that void a story that, somehow, despite the hurt and confusion, embraces the world around it with a steady and capacious centrifugal force. This is the endeavor of writing at its most open, meticulous, forgiving and tender--which is to say, this is writing at its best. --Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Masterfully structured and exquisitely written. Hsu's voice shimmers with tenderness and vulnerability as he meticulously reconstructs his memories of a nurturing, compassionate friendship. The protagonists' Asian American identities are nuanced, never serving as the defining element of the story, and the author creates a cast of gorgeously balanced characters. A stunning, intricate memoir about friendship, grief, and memory." --Kirkus Reviews *starred review*
"One of the finest and most heart-rending remembrances I've ever read. Hsu writes about grief and nostalgia, youth and identity, family and friendship, with elegant, heartbreaking clarity. I wanted to linger over every memory, to stay with Hsu as he rendered the vast expanses of time that defined youth--car rides, browsing at record stores, collaging together an identity from loves and hates. This is a book of exquisite pain and beauty. Absolutely unmissable." --Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2022
"The brilliant New Yorker staff writer. . .describes a formative friendship he had as a young man in the Bay Area--a friendship formed around what the two young men had in common and what they didn't." --The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2022 Book Preview"
"In every luminously rereadable, every-way-wending sentence, [Hsu's] writing astonishes. On the shaky formation of the self, it is unself-conscious; on the incredible youthful desire to make oneself known, it is knowing. Exploring identity, authenticity, and nostalgia as concepts and as feelings, this is an absolute stunner." --Booklist *starred review*
"In his moving memoir Stay True. . .the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu portrays, and in one section addresses, a companion from his youth who has stayed with him in absentia." --Claire Messud, Harper's
"A touching portrait of the years in a young person's life when every album, every item of clothing is a stake in the ground of their burgeoning identity." -- BookPage , "Most Anticipated Nonfiction of Fall 2022"
"This bittersweet memoir [is] a reflection on the power of friendship and how we can find connection in the most unexpected of places." --Time Magazine, "33 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022"
"Affecting. . . Sincere, funny, wistful--the phrase 'stay true' reflects the tone of the book and also its goal: to honestly remember a lost friend." --The AV Club
"Twenty-two years in the making, Stay True is not simply a project that reckons with race, ethnicity, identity, difference, youth, and intimacy--it evocatively probes how much one human can truly impact another, even in a short time." --New York Magazine, 57 Books We Can't Wait To Read This Fall
"Not since Ann Patchett wrote about her friend Lucy Grealy in Truth and Beauty has there been such an achingly tender book about a platonic friendship." --Los Angeles Times, 10 books to add to your reading list in September
"This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come." -- Rachel Kushner, two-time National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
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.
TOMMY ORANGE is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.
