Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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

Somehow, he remains optimistic. There’s no other way to be. The only constant in this life, in this work, is the passage of time, and with it, change.

Maybe those were the last days when something could be truly obscure. Not in the basic sense that a style or song might be esoteric. But there was a precariousness to out-of-the-way knowledge, a sense that a misfiled book or forgotten magazine could easily be lost forever. Learning about something a few minutes before everyone else converted to a k

But I was stridently noncommittal to them. I always left myself an out, an escape hatch in case someone offered me a new adventure, the adventure I thought I deserved. I looked forward to a time when I would be the finished article, my sense of the world innate and effortless, with no evidence that there had been any rough drafts.

I even felt protective of him in that moment, surprised, and slightly awed, by the fact that he held on to such grand visions of what life could offer.

I really hope you can read this. I don’t care if you can see through me, I wrote, confessing to a list of imperfections and insecurities. Just as long as you can see me.

We were in new cities, losing ourselves to new excesses, finding our way to higher rooftops, seeing a different shade of sunrise. But we were escaping different things.

thought I had a lot to say, but I felt timid about saying it. Making my zine was a way of sketching the outlines of a new self, writing a new personality into being.

I knew what I was against, but I couldn’t imagine what stood on the other side.