“What does it mean to truly be yourself?” asks Hua Hsu in his searing memoir of friendship that won a Pulitzer prize and, a year after its US release, is being published in the UK. Slim and unsentimental, the memoir poses other unanswerable questions: what does it mean to represent another person on the page? How do we write about the dead without resorting to eulogy, which is so often “the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased”? Will the dead person “one day be replaced by the character you invented in tribute?”
On the surface, Stay True is a reckoning with Hsu’s slow-burning grief following the murder of his Berkeley classmate, Ken, in a carjacking. Though they have little in common other than their Asian heritage, they’d spent long nights hanging out, smoking, arguing about music and driving to gas stations. Hsu began writing about their friendship, collecting notes and artifacts, almost as soon as Ken died, a diligence that shows in the vivid detail of mid-90s California life. As a story, Stay True is impossible to put down, a perfect 193 pages – I ate a sandwich over the sink so I could finish it. But it’s much more than a great story; its power lies in the questions we began with, and others: how do you accurately render a person you knew so briefly, at a time when your own identity was in flux and everyone around you was distorted by the cracked lens of your own becoming? What if someone doubts your grief, asking if you and the dead were ever “really that close”? Might you be lying to yourself?
