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My best friend had a stroke and died at 18. The type of relationship, the type of death matter in predicting how I will respond and grieve. For me, Jane's death was one of the worst things in my life � I spent at least my first year of college depressed � and, paradoxically, one of the most important and transformative events. As a result of her death, I learned life is unpredictable and can be short, that one never knows when a person will leave, and that there is a possibility for great joy as well as great pain. "The sky was gorgeous and calm, but what if a hurricane struck and my friends were stranded? It suddenly made sense to always assume the worst" (p. 140). And yet, as Viktor Frankl asserted, life is marked, if not defined by suffering and our response to it.

Jane and I had gone to an all-weekend outdoor concert several days earlier, but I hadn't seen or talked to her between the concert and her death, not even to tell her that I had gotten my driver's license. (This was before cell phones and easy access to cars.) For a long time, I felt guilty about not having seen or talked to her. "I believed I had somehow allowed all this to happen" (p. 124).

What I am saying is that Hua Hsu's Stay True, a story of friendship, books, writing, and grief, was different from my experience (his friend was murdered, for example), but also similar. Death often comes with all sorts of other emotions � and that person can hang around for years, in both positive and negative ways.

Hsu wrote, "This is a book about being a good friend, a term that only occasionally applies to me" (p. 195). While this may be true, he did a fine job describing friendship. One can be good friends even if nothing alike. That push and pull in a relationship can be exciting. As he noted in a letter to Ken following his death, "'I don’t care if you can see through me,' I wrote, confessing to a list of imperfections and insecurities. 'Just as long as you can see me'" (p. 165).

Often books written by men feel stiff and only deal with some parts of the emotion spectrum (e.g., anger, resentment, frustration). I liked reading and "watching" the central relationship here, as well as Hsu's relationship with his father, who was often living and working in Taiwan. I would have wanted to have been part of their larger friend group. I also liked that Stay True is by a Taiwanese-American, writing about a Japanese American, each with different immigration histories and family. Their ethnicity is present, without being all-consuming, as they are also people obsessed with music, sitcoms, books, the subtexts of each � and just growing up.