Hua Hsu’s Stay True, winner of a 2023 Pulitzer Award, is a memoir about friendship and loss, art and identity. The book follows Hsu as he navigates his undergraduate years at Berkeley; he befriends the other students living in his dorm, switches from an English major to a political science major, and spends hours writing for his zine. Like any college kid, Hsu is trying to figure out who he is and how he fits into the culture—an especially fraught terrain for an Asian American in the ‘90s—and uses music and film and literature as means of defining himself. During his first year, Hsu meets Ken, a guy who is, in many ways, the exact opposite of himself. Ken likes Pearl Jam and wears polo shirts, belongs to a frat and has no trouble talking to women, and yet, despite their differences, the two become close friends. Hsu and Ken spend the next three years growing up with each other, shaping their adult selves through shared experiences. Then, in a random act of violence, Ken is killed in a carjacking. In his grief, Hsu turns to writing, determined to keep Ken’s memory alive and to somehow make sense of the tragedy. Stay True is the story of their friendship, a breathtaking meditation on the transiency of youth and life.

Subtle yet powerful, Stay True gripped me from the first page and did not let go. From the description, it’s easy to assume the focus of the memoir is grief, but in reality (or at least, from my perspective), the bulk of the book is about friendship and connection, all the things that make loss more poignant. I loved all the details that made up Hsu and Ken’s friendship—how they smoked only so that they could have they could have private conversations on the balcony, how they wrote an entire movie script about their friends and their adventures with no intention of ever actually filming it—and found Hsu’s descriptions to perfectly capture the awkwardness and uncertainty, but also the extreme joy, of young adulthood. Like a researcher, Hsu digs deep into the concept of friendship, drawing on the ideas of philosophers and repeatedly asking what it means to know and be known. And he does it all with language that’s unpretentious, open, and even surprisingly humorous. Stay True is a beautifully written, moving tribute—I absolutely loved it.

I’d recommend this book to…

• Anyone who loves quiet, simple writing that shocks you with its depth… it’s similar in style to Norwegian Wood by Huraki Murakami
• Anyone interested in coming-of-age stories, especially ones about resilience… it’s similar in theme to Know My Name by Chanel Miller
• Anyone looking for something raw, honest, and hopeful… it’s similar in tone to Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner