“An elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.” —2023 Pulitzer Prize Committee
“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. . . 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.” —The New York Times
“[Hsu] is that rare thing: a chronicler and critic who [engages] fully, emotionally as well as intellectually, with every subject. . . In Stay True 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.” —Lucy Sante, The New York Review of Books
“An evolutionary step for Asian American literature.” —New York Magazine
“[A] luminous and tender-hearted story. . . Stay True is a nuanced and beautiful evocation of young adulthood in all its sloppy, exuberant glory.” —The Wall Street Journal
“[Hsu writes] with devastating emotional precision, questioning the possibility of meaning in tragedy and the value of the stories we tell while attempting to find it. [Stay True] is a thoughtful, affecting book. . . 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. Though Hsu claims, self-deprecatingly, that the term ‘good friend … only occasionally applies to me,’ the lasting effect of Stay True is that of an extraordinary, devotional act of friendship.” —The Washington Post
“A beautiful memoir [that] goes deep into the heart of friendships.” —The Financial Times
“Not since Ann Patchett wrote about her friend Lucy Grealy in Truth and Beauty has there been such an achingly tender book about a platonic friendship.” —The Los Angeles Times
“[Stay True] is funny and wise, an elegiac work of self-forgiveness. What a gift it is, Hsu concludes, to remember the people you loved, and who loved you, while you were busy becoming yourself.” —The Atlantic
“This fleet-footed memoir tracks a complicated and bittersweet portrait of Asian-American life with great verve and heart. . . Hsu pays poignant tribute to friendship and grief.” —The Boston Globe
“Stay True is as affecting as a great pop song.” —Jenn Pelly, Pitchfork
“Easily one of the most inventive memoirs to come out in years, Stay True is both deeply personal while also leaving room for its readers to reflect on their own life stories and the nostalgia we all carry with us. . . Hsu uses his keen memory and command of cultural touchpoints to craft something indelible here—a portrait of two unlikely friends that might very well epitomize a generation.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The Today Show
