Stay True
By Hua Hsu
- Genre
- Biography, Memoir & Autobiography
- Publisher
- Doubleday (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780385547772
Stay True is a memoir by New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, published by Doubleday in September 2022. It recounts his friendship with a fellow student, Ken, who was murdered during their college years in California. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the 2022 National...
There are memoirs that reconstruct a life and memoirs that reconstruct a feeling; Hua Hsu's Stay True does both, and does them with unusual restraint. Set among the mixtape-trading, zine-making friendships of 1990s Berkeley, it circles the murder of the author's close friend Ken and the long work of grief that follows. Hsu writes about identity, taste and belonging with a critic's precision and a friend's tenderness, never inflating the loss into a lesson. intendle recommends it as a model of how the personal essay can become architecture - spare, exact, quietly devastating. It earned the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Memoir and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it rewards readers who care about how young people build a self out of the culture around them. A short book that stays with you far longer than its length suggests.