Excerpt from Stay True by Hua Hsu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For a while, you were convinced that you would one day write the saddest story ever.



I remember listening to the Fugees. I remember the chill of the air. I remember the morning after, when everyone emerged from their own corner of the house, and Ken stepped out onto the deck, holding a mug of coffee. How does he know how to make coffee? I thought to myself. I should know how to do that, too. I have a photo of him still as he looks out toward the morning, clouds reflecting in his glasses. He only wore glasses on occasion, in a manner that made him seem serious, grown-up—never a nerd.

After breakfast—what could we have possibly eaten?—we ventured out to the white sand beach, though the weather was no good. I wore a thrift polka-dot button-up with a frayed collar, a brown cardigan, and a striped yellow-and-black beanie. Only my taupe Vans had been manufactured in our lifetime. There's a photo where I'm squatting down like a catcher, pensively looking for seashells. Ken stands behind, leaning over me and waving gaily to the camera. He wears a flannel-lined navy-blue jacket, tastefully baggy jeans, and brown boots. In another picture, he's perched coolly on a tall rock. "Take one of me and Huascene," he asks Anthony. He's affecting a debonair look, while I'm leaning next to him with a goofy smile.

Back then, years passed when you wouldn't pose for a picture. You wouldn't think to take a picture at all. Cameras felt intrusive to everyday life. It was weird to walk around with a camera, unless you worked for the school paper, which made picture taking seem a little less creepy. Maybe if you had a camera, you used it during those last few days of school, at parties or as people were packing up, the logic of last-minute cramming applied to the documentation of memories. If someone tried to take your picture, even if it was meant to be silly or spontaneous, you still fussed and awkwardly posed, because there was a finality to it, one or two snaps at most, any more would seem obsessive. A moment would pass, unremarked upon, until months later, when you developed photos you had taken at a concert or birthday party; a proper event worth chronicling, and you discovered some images of friends getting ready to go out, or else a slice-of-life candid intended to burn through the end of the roll. You'd forgotten about this. Later, when photography became ubiquitous, pictures were evidence that you existed at all, day in and day out. They registered a pattern. Looking back, you began to doubt the sequence of events. If, in the absence of proof, anything had happened at all.

From Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu, published by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Hua Hsu.