Stay True

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir
One of The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

A deeply moving memoir about growing up in the 90s, written in the wake of the senseless killing of a beloved friend.

‘A quiet, occasionally hilarious, ultimately devastating book . . . the most moving and memorable piece of autobiography I read this year.’ – The Independent, ‘The Ten Best Books of the Year’

‘A powerful and beautifully written meditation on guilt, memory and male friendship’ – The Guardian, ‘Best Books of the Year’

When Hua Hsu first meets Ken in a Berkeley college dorm room, he hates him. A frat boy with terrible taste in music. For Hua, who makes zines and haunts indie record shops, Ken represents 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 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 an intimate memoir about growing up and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

‘One of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith’s Just Kids’ – The Atlantic

Author Biography

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He teaches at Bard College and is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. Stay True was named one of the ‘Ten Best Books of the Year’ by The New York Times, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Originally from the Bay Area, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.