When Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, won a Pulitzer Prize, it represented an affirmation: of Hsu’s narrative, yes, which recalls a college friendship that ended in tragedy, but also of something more elusive. Stay True, after all, reminds us that we’re never too young to wrestle with the complexity of emotions. We’re never too young to confront the tangle of our hearts. Recently, Hsu and I discussed his work via email.
This article appears in Issue 24 of Alta Journal.
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Stay True is a coming-of-age story. It’s also a meditation on grief. How did the book evolve?
There are parts of Stay True I began writing when I was 21, as I was grappling with the loss of the good friend I see as the book’s hero. For quite a while, I didn’t understand it as a coming-of-age story, since I was still inside that process of becoming. It wasn’t until much later that I had the distance to see I had changed. I didn’t have any goal; I was just writing. I suppose I was, in some abstract way, trying to write myself back into the past, not necessarily out of nostalgia. As I got older, I became fascinated with how philosophers or theorists or artists dealt with notions of time or historicity in their lives, and that worked its way into my book too.
Can you discuss your relationship with Ken and the lingering effects of his death?
The book was an attempt to reflect on those effects: What did I learn from our friendship? How did it change me? But it was also an acknowledgment of the impossibility of ever answering these questions. When someone is no longer present and you’re only left with memories, are you actually engaging with them or with your slowly fading impressions? I’d like to think I picked up on some of his kindness and open-mindedness, but it’s not something I would have ever acknowledged back then—it was the result of going over those memories. I think this is how all friendship works, not just ones shaded by loss. You can never pinpoint the concrete effects we have on one another.
Memoir is an art of narrative but also one of reflection. How did you balance the two?
I hadn’t thought about this question because I wasn’t hardcore into memoirs. I read a few when I began writing to figure out how people had done it. For me, memoir needs to feel situated in the past but with enough reflection to remind the reader that it’s a narrative constructed from a distance. It’s a turning point, not the whole life. You need to explain enough of the life for that turning point to matter, and you have to think about proportionality. There was a version of Stay True that was twice as long, with digressions into communications technology, xerox machines, and samplers. But it felt way too long given the story.
How is it to see private material go public?
It’s been very weird. I had no idea what it meant to turn myself and my friends into characters. It’s uplifting to hear people who find the book inspiring. Others find the book a depiction of this fleeting moment of youth, and that’s unreal to me. I retained some of my teenage iconoclasm and initially assumed nobody would get the book because its perspective was so unique. I’m glad I was wrong and that I am pretty generic. I hadn’t thought about how a creation is no longer the creator’s once it enters into the world. It belongs to whoever engages with it and discovers something new and maybe unintended there. I should have anticipated this since, as a critic, I am doing this all the time.
What’s the balance between writing about others and writing about your life?
I prefer to tell stories about other people. I’m drawn to writing about others because it gives me an excuse to ask questions I might also ask myself. It’s not that I don’t find my life interesting; I just don’t think anyone else should have to find it interesting.
Why do you write?
For a while, I wrote in order to one day be able to write what became Stay True. I wrote to figure out my position on things, to bring clear, concrete language to abstract ideas or sublime effects. But I was also driven by a desire to work on my craft so I might one day describe the things in Stay True that took decades to figure out how to describe.•
