There is something about California that I’ve had to explain to my friends who are from other places: the seasons come in reverse. Winter in much of the rest of the United States is dead and gray, followed by the rebirth of spring. The overwhelming brightness of summer comes from the vibrant greens of fresh grass and trees with all their leaves. In California, however, summer comes in hues of gold, in dead grass that makes hills look as if they were woven. We go green in the winter, but even the dead things glow. There is a Californianess in that gold, and it creates a unique lens that Hua Hsu knows well, one that illuminated his years at UC Berkeley, the season of his life that is captured in his beautiful memoir, the July California Book Club selection, Stay True.
The book is written as if it were captured by the lens of a camera. It teems with small details that craft a whole world: play-by-plays of sports games, the fabric of a favorite shirt, the smell of cigarettes, the sound of inserting a mixtape into a car cassette player. Hsu writes about how his grief over the sudden and violent loss of his best friend, Ken—which is the core of the book—made him into a kind of reporter, keeping track of each passing day. But it’s clear that he had been keeping notes before then, literally or figuratively.
Hsu wants to be different from others—countercultural—during his high school and college years. The resulting memoir merges several conditions of feeling gifted and chosen—as if life is a scene set just for you and your friends—that are exclusive to the early seasons of independence in one’s life. Those seasons, when suffused with the California sunbeams, when reflected off the golden hills, become even more basked in privilege: the obvious kinds, yes, but also the privileges of land, movement, light, opportunity.
“Californians often grow up with a sense of entitlement simply because they get to live in California,” Hsu writes. “It’s where people dream of ending up.” Hsu’s sensory memories are the kinds that come to a person in awe of their life. His book—like other memoirs of California—has a beautiful, poetic quality. He writes about drives through the Berkeley Hills:
We went for late-night drives in the Volvo I’d inherited from my mom. I made tapes for those drives, noisy pop songs clattering through the door panels. One night, he pointed to a hill. “Let’s go up there.” We had no idea what road would lead there, so we just kept moving, approaching, expelled down a one-way street, doubling back.
These passages reminded me of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about two brothers bonded by family and tragedy, newly California transplants. In passages that seem as if they were written on the very same roads, Eggers writes, “The sky is blue for us, the sun makes passing cars twinkle like toys for us.… We are in California, living in Berkeley, and the sky out here is bigger than anything we’ve ever seen—it goes on forever, is visible from every other hilltop.”
The beauty of the landscape in Hsu’s memoir and in Eggers’s book is fused with another feeling endemic to a mercurial young adulthood: that you are the very first person to feel this particular kind of ecstasy. Before you know it, it will pass, but in those moments, scenes, emotions, and relationships can be burnished with an immense magic. As Joan Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”
At the heart of Stay True is the kind of intimacy—romantic, occasionally, but mostly platonic—that comes with being 20-ish. These are the friendships that shock you with their intensity, their sense of kismet. The kind of love you feel only when it is the first time. And in Hsu’s case, when loss comes so suddenly and violently, this love becomes something deeper and more permanent, like a scar. Stay True is a great book because it is a labor of love, because it is earnest.
Here’s something else Didion wrote, in “Notes from a Native Daughter” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago.… All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.” She’s right. Hsu’s Berkeley doesn’t exist anymore—many of the stores and landmarks that he artfully maps are out of business now. The blessing and curse of a college town is the rate at which it must change. Lucky for readers, Hsu took notes.•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hsu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest José Vadi to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
Poet and critic David Woo (Divine Fire) writes about Hsu’s memoir as a Künstlerroman, tying his coming-of-age memories to the critical lens he developed. —Alta
HOLLYWOOD DREAMS
Journalist and critic Lorraine Berry interviews Gail Tsukiyama about her novel The Brightest Star, which imagines its way into the life of film star Anna May Wong. —Alta
JULY RELEASES
Here are nine books by authors of the West that we’re excited about for July. —Alta
MIDAS TOUCH
Arts and culture journalist Eva Recinos writes about Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Holding Pattern, in which “touch serves as a conduit for trauma, first-generation guilt, grief, heartbreak, and starting over.” —Alta
CAMPAIGNS OF DESTRUCTION
Goodreads, which was founded in California, faces criticism for allowing the practice of review-bombing. Unfair commentary about books can fester and destroy a book’s sales prospects before it is even written. —New York Times
GOODBYE TOUR
Austin-based author Owen Egerton (Everyone Says That at the End of the World), who was founder and emcee of One Page Salon, at which authors were able to read a single page of a work in progress, is leaving the community he helped define for two decades because the state has become unwelcoming to trans children. —Austin Chronicle
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