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Given all the hype, all the year-end best-of lists it appeared on, I expected more from this memoir.
Not establishing very early on who Ken was and why we, the reader, should care about him was a huge misstep. I spent the first half of the book wondering who this random guy the narrator kept mentioning was- his future lover? Someone famous I was supposed to recognize?
Turns out, he’s just Hsu’s acquaintance from college.

Some memoirs are worth reading simply because the author has led an interesting life. Others, because the quality of the writing. Very rarely do you get a masterful writer who has a very unique life-story to tell.
Stay True is none of the above. The random act of violence on which this book is centered was a tragedy but Hsu himself is neither interesting enough, nor is his prose impressive (merely competent) and the narrative frequently stalls out because of all the random anecdotal asides about late 90s/early 2000s Berkeley/clothing/internet/music that detract, rather than add to the story.

The people populating Stay True are thinly characterized, usually directly, or through a belabored, way-too-long explanation of their musical tastes and how 20-year-old Hsu judged those musical tastes. None of the relationships- be it Hsu’s relationship with Ken, with his parents or former girlfriends, are detailed or fleshed out enough for us to care about them.

The narrative wanders aimlessly; it is not voice-driven, not plot-driven, not character-driven, not driven by much of anything except a vague grief over something that happened 20 years ago. Maybe I am just dead inside, but Hsu failed to make me believe that he was as impacted by the tragedy as he claimed to be.

My overall rating, using Hsu’s own scale: this memoir is like someone who listens to Pearl Jam but who pretends to love Nirvana (from before they were famous) but ultimately listens to Nirvana after all the bandwagon fans showed up, also they dress in vintage thrift store finds that they paid a less-cool friend to find for them, but you won’t find any photographs of their clothing because this was pre-internet when carrying around a camera would have been seen as weird so nobody posed for photos but also they are a straight-edged punk in that they don’t drink or chew or go with girls who do, because you can’t properly be judgmental of everyone when you are inebriated.

If you are looking for a moving, well-written exploration of grief through the lens of music, skip Stay True and instead check out Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.