Stay True

I was listening to an episode of the New York Times Book Review podcast recently and someone lamented the lack of books about male friendship in recent years, and I thought—what about Stay True?

Stay True is heartbreaking. I'm not sure if there's any other word more appropriate. The book is about Hsu's university friendship with Ken, and about the effects of Ken's murder during a carjacking—but in the details it's about so much more than that: coming to terms with who he is, situating himself in a tradition of Asian Americanness, deciding on which principles to live by and which to let fall by the wayside. It tends towards the same universality that the best memoirs seem to.