Mr. Hsu’s luminous and tender-hearted story of this brief yet intense bond with his lost companion, a tale of joy and grief in the time of Nirvana and AOL chat rooms ... a nuanced and beautiful evocation of young adulthood in all its sloppy, exuberant glory. Mr. Hsu is particularly adept at locating those tiny rituals that take on outsize importance ... as it turns out, Ken’s promise is Mr. Hsu’s potential. The lost friend has provided a spur to action for the survivor, whose final, cathartic act of self-forgiveness closes out this wrenching and richly detailed tribute to a friend and to the enduring legacy of a foreshortened life.
... quietly wrenching ... To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity ... This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion — all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life ... Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.
Moving ... He's a wonderful writer ... This book is a paean to the Bay Area in the 1990s, and to the uncertainties of anyone who is just trying to fit in. It’s also, in its own quiet way, an act of kindness.
Grief and guilt shadow even the sunniest parts of Stay True. Still, Hsu decides he can do something. For years, he’s been saving this up. It’s time to offer the world a loving, finely observed portrait of Ken and of their contingent, gentle, tragic friendship.
The murder of a college friend lies at the heart of Hua Hsu’s memoir ... Hsu describes both the buildup and the aftermath with devastating emotional precision, questioning the possibility of meaning in tragedy and the value of the stories we tell while attempting to find it. It is a thoughtful, affecting book ... While the murder is the crux of the book, Stay True also succeeds as a wry chronicle of the insecurities of youth. Late adolescence is recalled as a time of vivid memory-making, of earnest, intense identification with art and friends ... For all the soul-searching, therapeutic work and years of rumination imprinted on Stay True, it’s the ache of a friendship lost but honored that will linger for readers.
I devoured Hua Hsu’s Stay True in one sitting ... The details of this particular trauma are specific. But to the lingering question — what were the ’90s? — Stay True also serves as an expertly pieced-together collage of life in Berkeley as a twentysomething in the Clinton years, a snapshot that will be immediately recognizable to readers who came of age in that decade ... It becomes clear that Hua’s achievement is the not-so-simple act, 24 years later, of keeping his friend alive.
I’ve never read so perfect a description of collegiate friendship as the scenes in Stay True in which Hsu recalls the long days and nights spent with his friends, including Ken ... Hsu’s book is about grief, but it is also an exploration of what friendship means, and how it can mean different things from relationship to relationship, buddy to buddy.
Searing ... Slim and unsentimental ... This is a simply written book, but rich with painful subtext ... These meditations give the writing grace and depth. It’s not enough to classify Stay True as a friendship memoir, or a coming-of-age story, a tale of immigration and assimilation, or a philosophical reflection. It is all these things and more, wrapped up in a meticulous rendering of a 90s California adolescence.
Stay True brims with Hsu’s ardent devotion to music ... Hsu’s memoir tells a story of the self. A memoir promises to be singular, relayed through personal experience so that only the one who lived it can write it. But Stay True is made of more than just the self, and Hsu writes as if maybe, were Ken still here, Ken would already be privy to what Hsu has written.
Hsu writes with clarity ... Although Stay True deals with a difficult subject, one can’t help take hope in the parallel story is Hsu’s literary success.
... becomes a remarkable examination of the experience of immigration and assimilation ... a questing exploration of the elusive nature of friendship as it shifts and reshapes with the passage of time.
Hsu seems to have total recall, and apparently some very thoroughgoing journals. He is adept at evoking the flavor of specific times and places through a pointillist buildup of small details. He conveys the quality of passing time at an age when every day brings a new lesson with lifelong reverberations ... Hsu makes us see how his and Ken’s and their friends’ stories are tossed on the sea of history, how identity takes shape from a thousand factors, how personalities flow into one another, how chance and destiny can be hard to tell apart. He had to write the book to perpetuate Ken and bring him to the attention of the world.
Truer than true, becoming a biography of friendship writ large and in specifics, Stay True brings in history, philosophy, art, and science ... In every luminously rereadable, every-way-wending sentence, that 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.
Hsu braids music, art, and philosophy in his extraordinary debut ... Lyrical prose ... 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.
This memoir is 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.
