Stay True

"Well, usually here I’d have two automatic answers: this year’s winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography or Memoir . But what would you know—in 2023, the same book won both. Bard professor and New Yorker writer Hua Hsu’s Stay True centres upon the death of a Berkeley classmate in a bungled armed robbery. The Pulitzer judges declared it an “elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.” Stay True has been out in the United States since October 2022, but only reached UK bookshops this month. Also of note: The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras—a powerful memoir about Contreras’s Colombian heritage and an apparent supernatural inheritance—was also a finalist for both prizes. It traces her family’s history through decades of national upheaval; as the New York Times review noted , “spectral treasure hunts, abusive men, alcoholic ghosts and shape-shifting witches; paramilitaries set fire to a family farm, bomb blasts become a normal occurrence and an uncle is kidnapped by guerrillas four separate times.” Its reliance on oral history manifests as an unavoidably disjointed and unverifiable narrative, but it is nevertheless “a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”"