Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

We craved new contexts, initiating routines that might eventually feel second nature.

In the New World, things seemed in a constant ascent. My parents weren’t drawn to the United States by any specific dream, just a chance for something different. Even then, they understood that American life is unbounded promise and hypocrisy, faith and greed, new spectrums of joy and self-doubt, freedom enabled by enslavement. All of these things

When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others to f

I felt this aching nostalgia for things that happened just hours earlier and wrote them down as a historian might describe a centuries-past crossroads.

We would have continued living, reminded of each other when a song came on during a movie, or on the radio, or whatever unforeseeable technology delivered us beauty.

History is a tale we tell, not a perfect account of reality, I continued. You just have to figure out whether you trust the storyteller.

With the dissolution of feudal, old-world bonds, new possibilities of economic and social mobility emerged, and this transience infected the soul. People began to wonder whether we possessed some innate essence that might be discovered by peeling away layers of our surface. Or maybe there was nothing innate, and we were always in the process of sel

We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus.

had never heard Mojave 3, but their songs were perfect, like witnessing something beautiful happening in slow motion. I aspired to move through the world this deliberately.