Stay True

When a national-scale “growing up in the Bay Area” memoir hits the recommend shelf at Green Apple, one joins the already overflowing line at the San Francisco Public Library to secure a copy. Don’t even bother to think too much, just join the list. Read it when its your turn. Particularly as a transplant to SF, it is crucial to see culture through the eyes of a local, to know how similar or dissimilar things were to your lived experience.

Prior memoirs might have made you realize you like the genre. Or perhaps it’s because you are near in age to the people writing them, now; they recount your eras you experienced rather than the decades your parents cared about. The late nineties—maybe you were in college, or almost, around then. There’s bound to be some overlap–have you found a collegiate memoir from someone of your own cohort before? Don’t question why someone has experiences to fill a college-aged memoir while still in their mid-forties. Not yet.

Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief.

We were always being asked to read things for which we were unprepared. How can Foucault possibly make sense mere days into college?...For now, you underline the parts that sound as if they applied to your life, your perspective, whittling these systems of thinking down into something usable, like a sudden disdain for Nike.

Stay True smoothly recreates what it was like to be a late teen grappling with independence while being bombarded with information: the simple lack of knowing enough about the world; the attempt to draw everything back to yourself, to internalize anything so as to make it part of your identity.

Foundational to early academia, that pattern of overlaying someone else’s words onto your own experiences—of finding yourself in the text—doesn’t go away. The book has a subtle air of how juvenile—not necessarily in a pejorative sense, but in a "growing up and learning from others" way—it is to subsume someone else’s story as grist for your self. Perhaps, I thought, therein lied the secret to what the title meant?

Ken liked [the movie La Jetée], too, and said to tell him when I was going to rewatch it. I distinguished myself by the ferociousness of my attachments; there was something unique about my fascination with the film, something Ken couldn’t possibly understand. I was proprietary about liking things.….I offered him an overly vague window for when I planned to watch it again. But I was being dumb.

So many experiences cited here feel universal—the selfishness of early adulthood is apparent. The fact that you’re still a block of marble that must let events chisel away pieces of yourself until a finished you emerges. It is habitual to find yourself in the pages of a memoir, to parse and parallel your own past with the words. But something here–it was the Foucault quote, actually–made me pause. The palpable sadness, beyond the tepid wistfulness of age, shook me up. There was a longing for a set point in time—a specific and calcified time— that I’ve never known myself. It was directly after, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” that I finally looked at the back cover, almost idly, and caught words like “elegy” and “grief” before I looked away. Something is going to happen. Something bad.

It was good to be home, he wrote in the letter, but he looked forward to coming back up to Berkeley soon. He signed off with one of our inside jokes, one whose origin I can’t recall: “Stay true, Ken.”

The sadness overwhelmed my ability to place myself in the text. I was no longer reading to “underline the parts as they applied to your life, your perspective.” Once presented with evidence that the titular line comes from Ken, it’s impossible to not suspect–if you didn’t before–that he is the one that is lost. This story is now out of my hands, out of my experience, and I am reading not to see wisps of myself in college or learn about the Bay Area or anything quite so utilitarian; I am reading because the author is about to face tragedy, and I need them to keep going to make sure I see them make it through.

Ken tried to rally us to go swing dancing after dinner, but I told him I’d never do such a thing, let alone on my birthday. He was always asking, and I was always putting him off. Some other time…maybe.

The heartbreak leapt into clarity here: “Some other time.” That hurts to read. Hurts worse once you know, which you will in only a few more pages.

It’s said that James Cameron’s Titanic was such a box office smash because people who had already watched the movie bought tickets over and over again: “For the first three hours, Jack is still alive.” So they keep going back, to resurrect him, to live in the moments before he slips down into the north Atlantic.

Every page I have marked, every excerpt I blocked out, came from before. I didn’t know what I was reading, hadn’t learned the words “elegy” or “grief” were attached to this book yet. It lets you live through the friendship, see the person not in eulogy but in life, before it takes them away. No, it’s not fair to put it that way—Stay True doesn’t take them away. It is a monumental feat of resurrection to bring someone back for 115 pages.

It’s fucked up the way it is sometimes.” I had to dig through the back half of the book to find that quote. There is nothing more to say.