I read books funny.
What I mean is that my way of reading books is funny. And what I mean by that is my rhythm of reading is just downright absurd. I’m not talking about making voices or reading too fast and then too slow, either.
I mean I will pick up a book, make steady progress to about halfway through in two weeks time and then drop it entirely for almost three months. Then, after that interim period has passed, I will pick it up again, make steady progress over two weeks to the last third before telling myself, “screw it, we’re finishing this book TONIGHT!”
I don’t need to yell it aloud, just the thought is enough to reverberate across the walls of a small, 500 square foot apartment. I have tried other methods of reading. I have tried to make persistent reading schedules.
They don’t work. Nah, my dudes and dudettes and dudex in between, this is just how it is. When a book sits on my task list for a while, it eventually burns a hole and falls through to the center of the Earth. Then, in a reverse course of gravity, it boomerangs back and smacks me in the head.
“Hey, buddy, you forgot about this.”
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And that’s precisely what happened with Stay True by Hua Hsu. I finished it this weekend, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, a year after receiving it as a Christmas present in 2023 from my sister’s boyfriend. Let’s call him Jordan. And let’s just say he has impeccable taste, because this memoir was incredible.
An account of Hua Hsu’s youth as a second-generation Taiwanese immigrant child living in Northern California (among other places), the memoir moves fast and alternates between isolation and connection with vivid rapidity. He depicts the flights of undergraduate years with such candid and agility that it is impossible not to be enchanted by his imagery and perhaps transpose some of the same sensations he describes on to your own life.
The recollections never slow down, either—they actually come faster and harder as he enters the last third of his book—but the lessons learned from them did cause me to slow down as I came to the end. To savor every bit of emotion as he relearned and rewired his own story in the context of therapy sessions at Harvard.
It’s a series of recollections that’s hard not to be moved by. I rarely cry when I read or watch media, and this book was no different. But there were plenty of moments in this book where I laughed out loud, or felt interminably morose and left me wondering how I was going differentiate my own quest to write a book about my youth.
In undertaking that quest, I generally do not read modern literature. Not because it’s bad or stylistically difficult, but precisely because I try to avoid reading books that might affect my sense of style or just plain influence my narrative. By far and away, this book conflicts with that philosophy.
Hsu just goes for it and tells you exactly which professors, philosophers and publications influenced his thinking. There is no modesty as to the fact that he is an outcome of his own education, a story-telling telling a story he has told himself over and over again.
And yet, that may be a good thing. This is the kind of book that is indispensable as a model for how to write a memoir, and that makes it worth all the risk. If I stay true to myself, my influences will inform, but never overpower what I write.
I have but just one tip for anyone who wants to read this book: do not, under any circumstance, read the back summary. Go into this thing blind. I read it as I approached the last third of the book and instantly regretted it, as if I watched the wrong trailer to a movie I was really excited to see.1
Otherwise, pick it up wherever you can find it. It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant and worth your time, even if the last third is a bit of a slog.
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1 Seriously, marketers ruin everything up to and including what’s inside the box. If Hollywood made Se7en today, (one) it wouldn’t even be made, and (two) they would just tell you WHAT’S IN THE BOX. Just like that, all-caps and everything across the screen. I won’t because I don’t know who’s reading this and I’m trying to be better than the system that perpetuates all this bullshit.
The Casual Ramble 
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