Review: Hua Hsu’s Stay True
The translation of grief into language has been a site of frustration for generations of writers. As British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in his poem In Memoriam, “I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel; / For words, like Nature half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.” How do we put the overwhelming and obliterating experience of grief into a form that can be communicated to others? How do we make the people around us understand? These are the issues that haunt the margins of Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Stay True. Hsu’s memoir tells the story of his coming-of-age in Northern California, struggling to find himself at college, and grappling with grief and guilt in the wake of his close friend Ken’s violent death.
At its core, Stay True is about the transformative and life-altering effects of friendship. The memoir is a testament to friendship’s ability to change us while simultaneously showing us who we really are — or, rather, who we could be. It is a joy, Hua Hsu argues, to be known by the people closest to you. “I don’t care if you can see through me…” Hsu writes, “Just as long as you can see me.”
A recurring theme in Stay True is the obsessive urge to document and record in the face of loss. Described by Hsu as “a kind of showy archivalism,” it’s a way of coping with grief and of feeling as though you’re keeping the past alive. It’s also an attempt at meaning-making — Hsu writes, “I wanted to impose structure on all that had come before that July night [when Ken was killed], turning the past into something architectural, a palace of memories to wander at my own leisure.” If we can organize chaotic events into a stable narrative, then perhaps we can better understand them. Here the tension between archive and narrative rears its head — “What happened simply happened,” Hsu writes. All of which is to say Stay True is an excellently crafted narrative that calls into question its own narrativization.
Hua Hsu’s memoir is about personal and historical truth — but carefully, it never claims, itself, to be irrefutably true. “History is a tale we tell, not a perfect account of reality…” Hsu writes, “You just have to figure out whether you trust the storyteller.” Here we find the quandary Tennyson wrote about all those years ago — to write about something is, often, to change it. As Hsu himself admits, “The more I wrote about Ken, the more he became someone else.” But just as we change one another in order to create our truest selves, perhaps a somewhat distorted portrayal of the truth presents its own kind of, well, truth. Hsu may not paint a perfect portrait of his friend, but his portrait of his own emotions, thoughts, and grief is, if not accurate, deeply affecting.
Stay True by Hua Hsu is an engrossing, earnest, and honest portrayal of what it’s like to grow and lose and grow again. Hsu will be visiting the Seattle area on October 11th, speaking and signing books at Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park). Tickets and signed copies of the memoir can be purchased here.
