One year ago, The New Yorker staff writer and critic Hua Hsu published his singular memoir entitled Stay True. Earlier this May, the autobiography won a Pulitzer Prize.
Upon its paperback release, Hsu joins us to discuss the epigraph that frames the book (5:30) and his nomadic upbringing (9:45) scored by mixtapes (12:23) created by his Taiwanese father (15:14). Hsu then reflects on his arrival at UC Berkeley in the mid-90s (23:09) and how he formed an unexpected bond with a schoolmate named Ken (24:20).
On the back-half, Hsu describes the horrific night that Ken’s life was taken (36:58), the aftermath of this tragedy (40:15), his attempts to make sense of the past twenty-four years in Stay True (46:20), his complicated relationship to memory (49:00) and music (58:30), and how he’s held onto hope (1:03:02) through telling this enduring story of friendship.
Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show today. I'm joined by writer Wah Shoe. For the past two decades, Shoe has written about culture and music for a variety of publications, including by magazine grant Land, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, where he's been a staff writer twenty seventeen. In last year, in twenty twenty two, he published his memoir entitled Stay True. The title came from Shu's friend Ken, who would sometimes use the titular phrase to sign off letters or emails. Shu and Ken met at U C. Berkeley in the mid nineteen nineties. They had pretty much nothing in common. For starters, Ken love pearl jam while Sue, who forged friendships based on taste and music, did not. But more broadly, Ken was this jock type who came from a Japanese American family that had been in the US for generations. Schu, on the other hand, was a son of Taiwanese immigrants who spent his high school days making zines and crate digging in record stores across the Bay Area, and yet over the course of their freshman year, the two became close friends bound by a shared frustration with an American culture that didn't seem to have room for either of them. In many ways, Stay True is this really incredible love letter to their friendship. But it's also analogy because three years after they met, Ken was killed in a carjacking incident. It was brutal and sudden and completely senseless, which is why Shue has tried to make sense of it for the past twenty four years. The result is a truly singular memoir, one that was awarded the Pull Surprize back in May and is now available on paperback wherever you get your books. And so today we talk about Shoe's complicated relationship to the past, the music that shaped him, the memories he can't quite stop turning over in his head, and how he managed to make a book about growing up and moving through the world in search of both meaning and belonging. That's all coming up next with my guest, the author of Stay True, Wah Shoe.
Hope you enjoy, h.
Washoe, pleasure to meet you. I want to just jump right in because a year ago you published a memoir titled Stay True. At the time of publication, you did like a lot of interviews around the book, and just about all of them you had a very similar refrain, which was, I don't think people are going to read this book. And then people read the book, right, And then you did more interviews in which you said, honestly, I'm pretty surprised that they've read this book. So now that we're like a year out from the publication, the book is sold pretty well. It's been on a lot of lists. Most importantly, you won the Poll Surprize for Best Autobiography. Can we just start with like an honest question. Did you really believe that no one would be touched by this story or was this a kind of false modesty that you had.
First?
Sam, it's great to be here. I mean, maybe it was just a sense that the way I grew up was so specific and these experiences were so specific that no one would possibly understand. But I guess I didn't think that it was as relatable as it actually was. Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it makes sense. Why do you think it doesn't?
You know, it's it's funny. So you mentioned all these things I said a year ago, and over the past year, I've talked about the book for like hundreds of hours.
I'm sorry, No, it's been.
It's been. It's like taxing, but it's also just a privilege to be able to do that right. And I think over that time my understanding of the book has changed in a way where, you know, I sort of now understand it in a way that I didn't when I wrote it and when I finished it.
Well, I feel like that's a good place for us to dive in. And since you have talked about it so much, I'd like to try to get to some places that maybe you haven't got to before on record. And in that spirit, why don't we start with the epigraph from the book, which comes from a passage from Edward Hallett Carr's book What is History?
Only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past. And it's only the sense that we can speak of an ultimate objectivity in history? Is it once the justification and the explanation of history that the past throws light on the future and the future throws light on the past.
You said your understanding in the book has changed in the years since talking about it. Yeah, how do you understand that quote now in relation to the book as a kind of framing device.
That's a great question. So when I chose the epigraph, I just thought it sounded good. It sort of captured this feeling that I wanted to go for in terms of tying together the past in the future. But I think I just understand more what he meant by sort of the necessity of the past to imagine a future, but the necessity the future in order to like make sense of why we care about the past at all. So I think now I understand more that what I was trying to do wasn't necessarily a book about the past so much as a book about a future. And that's not what I went into any of this wanting to do or thinking I wanted to do.
Well, I think it's a good way to think about the book and this conversation we're going to have as we oscillate back and forth between the past and present and of course the future, because at the center of this book is this senseless murder of your close college friend Ken. He was killed in nineteen ninety eight in a burglary gone awry, and yet in describing how you want to tell his story, you write a true account would necessarily be joyful rather than moros a celebration of how it began rather than a chronicle of free fall. And so I just want to start at the beginning, Like you're born in Champagne, Orbana ILLINOI it's nineteen seventy seven. Your parents, Taiwanese immigrants, came to the States without quote, any specific dream, just a chance of 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 these things at once as a kid. How did they demonstrate that understanding to you?
It was mainly in the things that they had. My parents are pretty expressive as far as their generation is concerned. I think a lot of what I pieced together about their lives prior to my entry into it was in our book collection and in the collection records they kept, and sort of in the ways they engaged in the culture around us. So I think I learned a lot about reading, listening to music just by studying them, not necessarily by things that they said to me. So that became a way to ask, like, where'd you get this book about African American history? Like what prompted you to get into this, what prompted you get into that? And a lot of what I was asking them was sort of parallel to me learning more about the history of you know, Taiwanese immigrants and things like that, and realizing that they fit within this story, but that they also kind of deviated from it in certain ways too.
Why do you think they were more expressive than some of your parents' friends.
I think, even at a young age, they were always a little bit more willing to put themselves out there than I think I understood at the time. You know, when my dad arrived for grad school, he was pretty I don't know, he came for grad school. He just was going to study science and do something sciencey, but he got really involved in you know, student politics and collecting records and all sorts of things that by the time I came along, it's not like these weren't aspects of him, but it's not as though he had sort of like settled on to this path, right. But I always just loved this idea that you could sort of pursue these passions, or that you could have these passions and sort of like weave them into a fairly normal middle class existence. But yeah, maybe there was something unusual about them, But much like me writing about myself, like it was so normal to me that I didn't understand it until much later.
You mentioned your father's record collection, which initially you took not a whole lot of interest in. It seems like I can understand. I think many people look at their parents' music and go not for me. You had this nomadic childhood, first in Illinois, then Dallas, then Coopertino. Were those car rides with your father your first foray into mixtapes? And if so, what did he put on those early mixtapes?
That was my first experience with like music in general. And it's not just that my dad being into records made his music seem uncool. It made just the concept of music seem uncool to.
Me, the whole art form.
Yeah, I just thought music was something that adults were into. I would just listen to baseball games and AM talk radio, which I thought was much cooler than I don't know, the Beatles. My dad used to really work, like he would have like a legal pad and he would write down all these songs and then he would make these mixtapes that would auto reverse you know, so that if it was like a loop, so that what's that? You know, Sam, I don't know how old you are, Like, did you grow up listening cassettes?
You know? We don't have to get into my age. I mean, honestly, no, I'm just trumember that song. Age ain't nothing but a number. You remember that one, right? Yeah, I'm old enough to know the ILLEA track.
Okay, cool? So he would have this, He would make the tape this loop so that if you hit auto reverse, which would just play the other side of the tape, if you liked a song, you could just hit auto reverse and hear it again on the other side. Oh, so it would sort of go A to Z on one side and then Z to A on the other side. I think that works out. My dad's favorite song. I don't know if it's still his favorite, but one of his favorite songs is the animals House of the Rising Sun, or at least they made it famous. And it's about like sin, you know, and it's a pretty grimy song lyrically speaking.
Good karaoke song.
Yeah, and I never I never quite understood why. I've asked him about it, and he doesn't really kind of think about lyrics, maybe in a way that you know, you would think given him that he loves Bob Dylan so much. But I just liked the idea that they were listening to these songs about you know, histories or experiences or people that were like so different from us, and that there was something about them that was seeping into them, even if he would never visit the House the Rising Sun himself.
It's funny your description of your father is someone who is thoughtful about words, but only when he's writing them, not when he's looking back on what he has written. Because by the early nineties, you start making these these music scenes in high school and your father at that time had moved back to Taiwan for work and not of necessity. You too would communicate through fax machines where he'd help you with your math homework and then offer some bit of life advice. I think you just skipped the life advice and mainly took the math answers.
Yeah, I mean it didn't work because I still got like CS and math even with his.
Help, So you would have got an f without him.
That's true. That's true. He saved me from failing.
But these notes that you two would send back and forth via FACX. I thought we could read from one that he sent you in April of nineteen ninety four. This is after the death of Kirk Cobain.
Right.
Kurt's death was also on seven PM news here. I heard it in Uncle Spock's home during dinnertime. It's sad right now. MTV is a special to pay the memory. I agree, it's a society tragedy. Too much pressure. If he felt that it's beyond his control or creativity or else, it sometimes led to the conclusion of suicide, especially for talented artists. He felt that the sense of living disappeared. So sometimes the normal people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs compromise. That's the dilemma of life. You have to find meaning, but by the same time you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. What do you think.
To you know, piggyback on your father's question, But what do you think reading that now?
Reading it now, I'm just I'm truly in awe that he sort of took the time to I don't know, just unpack this cataclysmic thing in the life of a what was I seventeen seventeen year old, you know, just this idea that he not only cared enough to kind of understand what's going on in my life, but also was trying to help me process this loss, which I'm sure it was a big deal, but I don't think I was as devastated as he thought I was, if that makes sense. Like, I think I had sent him an incredibly dramatic letter about it, and I think even as I was writing the letter, I thought like, wow, I'm a pretty good writer, because this is this is a very compelling evidence that I'm like, I've been destroyed and I'm distraught, But I don't feel as sad as the people I see on the MTV news segment who are like crying, hugging each other in front of Kirk Cobaine's house, you know, Like I don't feel that depth of sadness. But for whatever reason, my father sort of interpreted the letter I wrote him as you know, like a code read like he still sort of thinks about things this way, just that humans are always just trying to find meaning of some sort, and that that's sort of the thing that one should try and do is to think about what's meaningful to them and to kind of live there. But it's very moving, and it's also kind of hilarious to me that I completely ignored the facts, Like I don't think there's a reply that I wrote that sort of acknowledges the depths of what are you saying? But you know, and then again, I was seventeen, Like I think at that age you're sort of obliged to not take your parents that seriously or not dwell too much on these things, just to kind of move on to the next high or low.
The sign off on his letters would often be, what do you think? Yeah, why do you think he did that?
I mean, this is one of those things where you know, we're talking about all this a year after the book's been out, and the book like really defamiliarizes my life back to me, Like even though I wrote it, everything in it feels natural to me because most of it happened the way it's written. I never really noticed this until I think my agent or my editor noticed, like, oh, like, it's really sweet how your dad keeps asking you these questions. So I thought it was just sort of this annoying thing where he was trying to extend the conversation. You say your piece, and then you sort of perform this little gesture of like all right, I'm giving you the mic back, like what do you think? But I do think that he is just this curious person, because he still does this now and often about questions that are sort of beyond my scope of like a cognitive Like I'll be watching like a soccer game, and he'll walk in and he'll say, like, whaw, why do people like sports? And then I'll have to like explain what investment we have in like sort of like watching competition and things like that. So I think it just sort of in his nature to try and understand what other people find beingful too.
I wonder, because later you write in the book The Immigrants, resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tens and informs, grammatical rules, what passes for style, and yet consequently you may struggle the whole conversation with your grandparents. It's possible they secretly wanted this to happen. A measure of generational progress. The child has learned to speak for himself, but to talk back as well. You write, well, not good. I don't know. I'm thinking about that passage, especially as you go to UC Berkeley next year in nineteen ninety five, and the distance between the two of you only increases, and the experiences are only more varied between him at nineteen and you at nineteen in America, I wonder if that question, what do you think is really his way of trying to bridge the generational divide.
Yeah, I don't think he would have ever put it that way, but I think he was trying to You're.
Like, this is a nice theory, but I don't know.
No, No, I mean I think that this is I think you're right. Looking back, I think he was really just curious, you know, and I think he was trying to understand, like He's like, in my generation, these things happened, but in your generation, these things are happening, and you know, we can compare, but there's limitations to what that can tell us. Like when I was in my early twenties, I remember my dad saying to me, your generation, like your life is much harder than mine. You know. It wasn't referring to what had happened to us in college or anything like that. He just meant more generally, like you have more choices, you have just a much more complicated reality to deal with. Like, yeah, like I came to the United States by myself. I was in grad school, Like I had to like figure out my way, but there was just a single path to pursue, Like there was nothing else. There was nothing existential about how he viewed his life in his twenties and thirties. And he would look at me and he would say, like, you know, your life is just so much more complicated because you're you're constantly trying to think about like where do I belong, Like what is my community? What is meaningful? Like these things were just so much more open for me, and that that's something that he was happy about, right, Like that's why he and my mother work so hard to sort of give me these choices. But he was like, I don't envy the fact that you have all these choices, And so I think he was really sensitive to kind of how different my growing up was from his.
Well, the context he gives you in that facts is this line I love. How to handle contradiction is a challenge to every one of us. And so when you land at UC Berkeley in ninety five in an old Volvo decorated with stickers of indie bands. By the way, which bands were on those stickers.
I think it was. It was like an NPR sticker, a live one o five sticker, a sticker for the verve, I think, and uh, probably a smashing pumpkin sticker like commercial mainstream.
It's good.
It's a good image. It's good image. That's that's exactly how you land driving into the Berkeley campus, yep. And once you like unpack getting your dorm, you start to move out into the campus and do what many of us do when we land at college, which is to look for people that are like you, that had the same interests, hobbies, dreams, et cetera. But tell me what happened the first time you met Ken, because on paper, he did not seem to meet your criteria for friendship, right.
Yeah, I mean I don't even know the first time I met him in that you know, when you're living in a dorm, you just sort of go from room to room and introduce yourself and you know, scan the posters on the wall, size up what someone's wearing, and then sort of make that quick decision of you are or not my people.
It's the most embarrassing thing. I remember that so vividly.
Yeah, and so I think the first time I met him would have been in one of those kind of group contexts of like, oh, we're gonna go hang out on the fourth floor or something, and yeah, yeah, he certainly was not my aesthetic.
He was.
Kind of this confident frat guy, and I sort of fashioned myself as this sort of sensitive indie kid, right, I sort of lived in that stereotype for a while, and you know, we would hang out. He would sort of come hang out in our dorm. This was the era when only one person in it out of like five or six had to own a computer, and so sometimes he would come check email once a week in our in our dorm room. One day he came back from vacation. He needed help with the suitcases. I sort of begrudgingly helped him, and then he asked me to help him buy some clothes, and I thought, like, man, this guy's actually he actually appreciates my style, Like he actually appreciates.
My aesthetic, And what was your style? At the time.
I was just into whatever it meant to dress a little differently in the mid nineties, like I don't know, thrifty, old cardigans, old ski jackets, a lot of a lot of polyester.
And he thought, like you that your style was excellent, right how it all went on?
Yeah? He he who you know, wore like tucked in polo shirts and jeans that actually fit and things like that. He asked me to help him shop some clothes, and I thought he's actually in esthete, like he actually understands what I'm trying to do here. So I took him to some vintage shops and it turned out that his frat was having this seventies party and he just wanted to look just spectacularly bad, like just kind of eye poppingly garish. But you know, like I still kind of appreciated that he knew, like, if I need someone to help me do this, that's the person to help me do this.
So you didn't take it as a slight attack on your carefully curated style.
No, No, I didn't. I mean I think at the time, I don't know. I think when you're trying to put something out there and nobody notices, if anyone notices, even if it's to as long as it's not out of pure mockery, right, because this was like kind of loving mockery. It was like this is this is ridiculous, but you can help me in some way. No, I actually thought it was like kind of sweet.
The two of you become friends, you grow closer over the next year. In that time, you grow a little more politically active on campus, which inevitably bled into the zine that you were distributing around town. I just want to read from the welcoming note of your fifth issue of that zine. I'll read it for you this time.
Sure, you know, save me the embarrassment.
You're right. Zines are a metaphor for life. It's your creation and your voice and your life, a form of expression that can be perverted by nobody and accepted hated by everybody. Create, destroy, and subvert. Nobody will care about what you didn't say, if that makes sense. So go out there and shoot a video, make some racket, xeroxa zine, and make your own indelible mark on the world.
You embodied it exactly as it was intended to be embodied.
So you know, there's some confidence there, there's some hubris, there's a lot of passion. Do you think those zines were the purest expression of who you were, or was it the most clear expression of who you wanted to be.
That's a great distinction, probably the latter more than the former. It's definitely, you know, like I alluded to earlier, one guy I know had a computer, and I remember around this time discovering like email listservs and meeting a lot of people who are into the same music as I was over email, and I think writing, whether it was making the zine or being on these lists serves, it was a way of conjuring a vision of who I wanted to be. And so yeah, like I sort of cringe hearing those words read aloud, because in a way they're not. They were never meant to be read aloud, you know what I mean? Like I would have never said those words aloud.
They weren't meant to be performed as I just as I just performed them. No, no, no.
But there was something about writing, sitting alone at night, cutting them and pasting together a zine that felt like a form of self fashioning that I wanted to participate in. But it was definitely like a person I wanted to become more than the person I felt confident in being at the time.
Who did you want to become at that age.
I think it was more the idea of being part of part of something like a community, a scene. I think it's what dreamy too. I don't know, like the kind of political stuff I was doing in college as well as the zines, was just this idea of entering into this network, you know, Like I didn't think my zine was particularly great, but it was like a way to enter into something like I could then say like, hey, can I interview you for this? Can I trade you this for that? And I think at the time a lot of it was just around like going to shows or record stores and things like that, like just having the confidence of going to a show, like knowing a bunch of people there, or going to a record store and not being sort of like intimidated out of buying things by the clerk.
You know, and wanting to be part of something. I figure. We go to a clear moment where you're describing the value of friendship, and especially in your early twenties, when that matters so much, your relationship to friends and the currency of friendship. This is on page forty four. As you begin to form your own kind of group.
There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends looking for an all night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it's perfect. Maybe your lifelong fascinators with harmony finally began to make sense in those scenes packed in your family station wagon, singing along to God only Knows, waiting in the parking lot until the song was over.
I know you said that rereading these passages defamiliarizes them in some way. Is that what you said there was some Just.
That the book in general is like this defamiliarizing of my own life because people will talk to me about it. It's certain where to return myself my friends into characters and then put those characters in a story. Which I then sort of talk about as though it's not just a bunch of stuff that happened. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I guess this is kind of a meta question since we're doing the thing we're talking about, right, Yeah, but how do you hold those memories with not just how you render them in the book, but how you are now asked to render them and reflect on them in interviews? Like how does your life not end up feeling like some chapter in a book or a scene in a movie.
That's a really wild way of putting it, you know, when you read from the zine earlier and I was talking about like no one will ever no one will ever hate you, or like whatever I said about kind of why I was important. I think when I wrote those words, I thought, this is the truest These are the truest words I will ever write. Like I believe so much in this, like the free expression of making the scene.
You said, uh, nobody will care about what you didn't.
Say exactly, And I think that that's true. And so I think when I was in my teens and twenties, like I did aspire to write these like polemical truths, if that makes sense. And then I think in my thirties and forties when I was working on this book, I was trying to render these memories in ways that was true to how they feel as memories. So they are like scenes in a book, but they're also exactly how I want to remember them, while being conscious of the fact that, like I would never have a reason to remember them if Ken, We're still alive.
After the break more from Washoe. When you won them the pol Zerprize, you posted a two part caption on Instagram in which you said, the book's not about the past, It's about memory. For a long while, I only remembered the terrible things, or maybe I chose to. And so when it comes to the night of July eighteenth, nineteen ninety eight, what are those memories that play in your head?
So that was the night Ken through a housewarming part. It's the last time any of us saw him alive, you know, Like I played that night out in my memory so much in the days following and then sort of in the years since that it now does feel like I'm watching a movie. Like I've thought about what it was like to be on the balcony talking to him. I've thought about what it would have looked like from across the street to see us talking, And so I don't know, like it's a very it's very it's obviously like it's a very sad night to think about. For a while, I thought like I have all of these old old songs, like old notebooks, I have all these kind of vestiges of our friendship, Like maybe in some way all these things are clues and they can help me make sense of something. But I think in reality, there is no way to make sense, like it was a senseless, freak thing, and there's no way to actually go back to the past. There's no way to actually return into the historical past, like there's only the future and in order to reconcile that. It's not something that I set out to do, but it's something that I think I ended up realizing. So there's no way that the reason I'm doing this isn't to make sense of the past, it's to make sense of.
The future in that moment. To describe for people that haven't read the book, essentially, your friend had a house for my party that you attended, but that you had to leave early because you had another engagement after and the party goes late, and somewhere around three in the morning, your friend goes down to the parking lot of the building, where a man and his girlfriend attack him, ask for his wallet, then put him in the trunk of his own car, and he does what they ask of him, which is to give him his bank cards and take off his shoes, and they go to a couple ATMs, maybe just one. They take out a couple thousand dollars, and he agrees to all the conditions, and nevertheless they drive out of Vallejo and they kill him that night. And these people are not like criminal masterminds. It was not preconceived, as far as I understand it. They then the next day go to a mall and use his cards to go on a shopping spree. Like these people were bound to get caught, probably knew they were getting caught. Did any of that senselessness, the fact that it wasn't coordinated, that it wasn't some like long standing plan that they had devised, did that make the whole thing more upsetting and mystifying to you at the time.
I think what was mystifying at the time was just the bare facts of it all. It's strange because now looking back, I don't feel I personally dwelled on like the crime itself. You know. I remember, like a few days later, like a police officer told told a bunch of us, I go, like someone tried to use his credit card, and then I think one of our friends actually went to the mall and like got them to pull this here. Like it didn't make it seem it didn't really change my estimation of what had happened, because like all that mattered to me was that it happened, you know, because there was no way to there was no way to there's no way knowing any more about the alleged killers would have changed how I felt.
So it makes sense, like or it would have brought him back.
Yeah, Like I didn't feel any sense of like vindictiveness. I think I was so absorbed in the fact of the loss that I don't know, like thinking about motive or thinking about randomness. I don't know, Like it was just so beyond my scope of what I could think about at the time. And it really wasn't until around twenty years later that I realized just like just how random it had been and sort of just how out of character this had been for the people who even did it.
And yet, despite your resistance to learning more about the case or not wanting to make it seem or feel real, you were the one that was asked to give the eulogy at his funeral.
Right.
Yeah, For a while, I thought it was the only thing I would ever write in my life of like any value. For a while, I really thought that the eulogy, which was not just me, it sort of wove in a lot of feelings among like our little group of friends, that this was like the truest form of expression that I was capable of.
Can you read that? For people?
It was an out of body experience. I didn't recognize the words on the page. I was somewhere else. I didn't recognize the clothes I was wearing, the black bowling shirt and pinstripe pants I had bought a few days earlier. Each of us must protect our memories of him, I said, because it brought a little bit of him back. It was the only way to bring him with us into the future. I listed all the things we would never do with him, from the long tease performance of Piano Man with Irami and Alec, to giving Steve his birthday present, to graduation weddings, playing with Gwen's future children. We're sorry. This world is so fucked up. It took you from us and us from you. Sammy had thought the swearing was a bit much for such a grave event.
Do you think it was?
Oh?
I didn't at the time. I don't know, Like it just felt like, who cares if I'm swearing right now? But a couple friends who got to that part of the book said like, I agree, I was really shocked when you when you swore, So I guess, I guess maybe it wasn't the classiest thing to do.
So it's funny you mentioned those other friends because as we're trying to make sense of this time and relaying bits and pieces of it, I know that when you started writing this book, you found a letter from your old roommate Anthony, which was written right after you got back from the funeral, and he expressed that you were not really dealing with Ken's death in the aftermath of it, And yet in an interview you just did recently, you said about Ken's death, that's all I thought about from ninety eight to ninety nine. One side, I guess I'm just trying to make sense of your friend's perception and how you saw yourself in terms of dealing with grief.
Yeah, I mean I think that I don't really know what it would have meant for any of us to really have quote unquote dealt with it. I mean, this is a very different kind of era and mental health. Like none of us, as far as I know, like was going to therapy or really talking through anything. But I think that they felt as though I was, you know, thinking a lot about the past, writing a lot, but I wasn't really trying to I wasn't really reaching out, you know, I wasn't really talking to people about what had happened. And this was something that I think a lot of us feared in that immediate aftermath. Like I remember being on our way down to the funeral, and you know, we were just sort of this moving pod of friends going from like Wendy's to the funeral home back to the most tell like we were just inseparable and thinking like, at a certain point, we're not going to be inseparable, We're not going to just be sort of crying each other's arms, Like what's that going to be like? And I think I felt self conscious about the fact that I was still there, like I was still just dwelling on stuff and writing everything down, but I wasn't necessarily trying to process stuff with my friends through talking or through yeah, I mean just talking about it. So even though in my head I was very much back there, I guess from the perspective of other people, like I was just not really present.
I feel like that extended to how you framed and made this book, because it's my understanding that you didn't ask friends yeah for their version of events. It almost seems like, tell me if I'm wrong on this, But it seems like you're almost more interested in interrogating the objects from the past than than the people in it.
I think the central question of the book wasn't for me like what happened, because we all, like everyone knows what happened. I think the central question I was trying to answer was why it had stayed with me for so long. And I think that you know, loss, tragedy like they sort of take sort of set up in us in different ways, and I was just sort of trying to figure out, like, what was it about this that made me, at least in part, who I am today? And so that was less of a question about the actual facts of the past, Like that was less a question about like history. It was more a question of imagination and memory and at what point you can imagine this, At what point you can imagine that, at what point this memory becomes a different memory. It wasn't like a group biography, Like it wasn't a biography of a group of people. It wasn't like a history of the late nineteen nineties, even though at one point I thought it was both of these things. It was more a book about my own relationship to my own memories, as far as it's reverberations through my life. Like I don't think I really held on to like I've never left campus, Like I still teach college students, and I'd never really processed why I'm so drawn to campuses toward like mentoring college students. Sort of these things, you know, like the fascination with like writing, the fascination with the past, the fascination with like the impossibility of ever conjuring the past. I realized that a lot of these things are kind of innate to my set of interest, but that they're also I don't know, like just due to this thing, you know, this this absence.
We spent a lot of time talking about the past and all that's happened, and yet in the years that followed your friends passing, most of your work was about the future. And you have one quote where you said, all my work is about the future and about how artists who don't have encumbrances like the rest of us imagine the future. Do you think you gravitated to those stories and those artists because their ability to imagine the future was something you yourself wanted. Yeah, I do.
I think one of the reasons I've been drawn to I don't know, like the records or the movies or the things that I'm interested in, is because it's like people drawing on things they've learned, like their own, things they've loved, and they're turning it into something else, like they're there's a forward propulsion to culture that stays rooted in the past. It stayed rooted in these traditions and legacies, but it allows us to turn the past into something else. There was this It's actually a scene in the book that got cut because it didn't really have a place in it, But there was this time when Ken and I went record shopping at some point in like probably like ninety six ninety seven, and there was like this record store in Berkeley that was basically giving everything away. Everything was like a penny. And he had taken all these records from like Sticks and Christopher Crossed, like seventies rock that like I was not that into, and I had just grabbed all these records that were like sound effects and weird lounge records and things. And after his passing, like I had his records in my records and I actually bought a sampler and thought that I could create a piece of music like this was like era of like shadow, like you know Jade Dilla, Yeah, And I thought like, oh, like I'm going to figure out how to make music because I can use these raw materials that we drew from the past and create something new out of them. Like I'm going to create this like sample based suite of like the records that we dug that day. And I think that image of the culture gave me was of like, you know, people who were digging through the craze of the past and like coming up with something new, and that's where I wanted for myself. I just didn't really know how to do that well.
In a way. Didn't you do that by spending two decades of writing about music, Like, in some ways was creating a career out of music, your way of not having your heart calcify.
I mean, it's weird, though, is that I think when I write about music, I demystified for myself, which I don't like, which is why I don't do it as much as I used to. But you're right that music. I mean, like I have this whole thing about how I think music is how I was taught, like the emotions I have, Like you learn about love and heartbreak and all these things before you ever experienced them through through songs, And I think I was in pursuit of certain feelings that I found in music before I could ever articulate them through language. I don't remember how it came up, but at some point over the past year, I think when I was thinking about my relationship between music and writing, I came to realize that one of the things that I really love about, like Pharaoh Sanders the saxophonist. But when I was a teenager and to some extent now, but definitely after nineteen ninety eight, I would go to the record store and just like be in search of a new feeling, and I just love things that were melancholy but not sad, because like I think what I felt was just this kind of slow drain of energy. And it was this Pharaoh Sanders record Jewels of Thought that has this song hum Allah, and I remember listening to the first time, I think in the winter of nineteen ninety eight and thinking like, this song is so like stormy and chaotic, but it's also so beautiful and peaceful, and that this is sort of this is like how I want to feel. And it wasn't until I finished writing the book that I realized that I think one of the things I'd been hung up on was just how I don't know, like how despair and like sad and trying to sort of capture those feelings of loss and sort of forgetting that that's also tempered by joy and these like memories of like why the loss feels so grave, right, because like you once felt so high, it's why you feel so low now, And that writing the book was this way of kind of getting to that space that I heard in music, of like being high and low at the same time, being like happy and sad at the same time, and that if we'd been talking about this a year ago, I don't think I would have understood that about it quite yet, because when people first read the book, they would say, like, oh, it's really sad, but it's also really funny. And I thought, like, I didn't intend for it to be one or the other. It's good that it can do both, right, It's good that like, because that's just how life is. And I think for a long time I just thought like, this was only a sad story.
A father wants facts's son, and so that's the dilemma of life. You have to find meaning, but by the same time you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction as a challenge to every one of us. It's almost like he incepted this inherent struggle somehow, knowing that one day, twenty years after a horrific tragedy, you would have to reckon with it.
No, it is it is insane. Actually, it was chilling to find the faxes in our garage and then to look at them and to I don't know, just have this record of like what he was thinking at the time and what he thought I should be thinking about. I ran into the house and like, hey, we have all the factxes and my dad was just like why do we still have those? And I started reading to them to him and he's like, I don't remember any of this. You know, he was like a very he works in the technical fields, like he wants everything to be run according the rules of like precision and efficiency, logic science. That doesn't necessarily make it easier for you to deal with like the messiness of life or like randomness or accidents or contradictions. And I don't know, like, even though I am not at all like a technical person, I think that central question that you had of you know, like how to how to live life but not be a robot? You know, how to sort of allow that messiness in your life and allow it to help you find meaning. It's certainly not something we would talk about, but it's something that like he wrote to me, And even though I'd be lying if I said that, like, it's stayed with me since I was a teenager. It's sort of amazing for me to think what it would have been like had things been different and I had taken these words of heart back then.
As we go, what makes this story obviously so heartbreaking is the possibility for for your friend, you know, was cut off. And at the end of the trial. In people versus Love, there's a rendering, at least as you can find it online. And according to the DA's prepared statement, Ken's mother, speaking during a victim's impact statement, she said, I have to find peace, but because my son was tortured for two hours, I may never find peace. This has changed all of our lives forever. And you know those lines, I don't know, they've just stayed with me. I wonder if at this point, after having written what you've written, if you've found peace in some way.
It's weird because I've been asked a version of this question many times, usually like was it cathartic to write? But for whatever reason, just we've had a conversation that's been like very different from any that I've had before, And I don't know, like it's your question is sort of like hitting different. Does that make sense?
How do you mean?
I guess the question of peace was never I don't know that I was looking for peace, Like that wasn't what I was looking for because I think for me, I think when I started all of this, and I guess I would go back to like July twentieth, nineteen ninety eight, when I just started writing stuff down. I was looking for something. I don't know what it was, and I still can't quite articulate what it was. I've found. But I guess peace sounds too stagnant for me. I think I just have a new relationship to the past, and there are aspects of it that feel like serene, But I don't know that it's like a more dynamic relationship to the past than what I thought was possible, And so I think with strange I don't know, like a strange consequence of all this is that people I'll meet who've read the book will talk about him as though he's a character. I mean, he has a character in a book, but they'll sort of like talk about him in a way that I find really moving, Like people will sort of draw the dichotomy of the book, like he seemed great, You seem like someone who I would have wanted to punch in college, you know, And I love that, Like I love that there are people who now find this, I don't know, like model for kindness or bravery or friendship or open mindedness. They find it in the pages of this book, and this character who was like a real person who they never got to meet, and that he sort of survives in people's lives. Like I was trying so hard not to say, does that makes sense?
It would be fitting, It does make sense.
You know. There was this moment when, uh, I think my parents and I like didn't really understand each other right after all this happened, because I think for my parents they were like, why are you so affected by this? Like you were just his friend, you weren't you weren't his mother or father? And yeah, I mean I think the idea of her pursuit of peace is like it really dwarfs anything that I could have pursued for myself. I don't think like even if I was pursuing peace or Catharsis, it's on such a minuscule scale in comparison to HER's father.
And yet the result of this book is that so many people who would never have met Ken, or certainly would not have known him in the way that you've illustrated, now get to have this person. And so I guess my last question is that song you all liked to sing by the Beach Boys. God only knows it's one that you all would sing together in the car, and by you all, I mean your three friends and not you because you did not want to join. And they're not very good rendition, but the lyrics of the song are tough. I hadn't looked at him in a long time, but I'm just going to read the lines here. God only knows what I'd be without you if you should ever leave me, though life would still go on. Believe me, the world could show nothing to me, So what good would living do me? I guess my question is can you listen to that song and not be haunted by those lines? Yeah?
I can, because I think when I set out to write stuff down, I just wanted to spend a little bit more time in the past, and there are just certain moments I wanted to live in for a little bit longer. I don't know if it's solis, but it's a sense that I've finished something that I set out to do. I can't describe why I set out to do it in the first place, but I think it was as simple as like, I just want to remember what this room looked like. I just want to remember what this adventure felt like. I think for me, the idea that I can now, through remembering those things, feel like happy to have known him and like happy for those memories. Is not a place that I thought existed when I started all this, So in that way, like it is, there is some solace there right, like the fact that I can now look back and remember how crushed we felt, but also just how ecstatic we felt leading up to that. That kind of puts me somewhere that, like I didn't think was possible. And that extends to the music too, and just sort of being able to listen to things in the past and kind of appreciate those stacked experiences, like of listening to something when you're really low, listening to something when you're really high, and just knowing that it's it's all there when you go back to a song.
The contradiction. As we're trying to find the words, I realize we can just read from the book to close us out at the bottom of one ninety two, because I began this talk by quoting one line from the paragraph, and I feel like it's a fitting place to leave us. This is from Stay True.
The true account would necessarily be joyful rather than morose and surrendering the joy wouldn't mean I was abandoning you. A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle free fall, a tribute to that first sip rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred. And it would be filled with dreams and the memory of having once look to the future and eagerness to dream again. It would be boring because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.
Well, I want to thank you for the poetry, some bits of history, and most importantly letting us, I think, live in this past with you, both with this book and in this conversation. I know it is not an easy thing to share your life in the way that you have, and I know I'm not alone when I say I'm grateful that you have and that you did.
Sam, thank you so much for this really unforgettable conversation. I'm really I'm so grateful for just how much you've thought about all this stuff.
Wash you, thank you for the time.
And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. If you want to go above and beyond. I say it every week, I mean it every week. Sharing the program on social media, sharing it with a friend really does help us continue doing the work we do here each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Elaina Hershey, the team at Penguin Random House, and of course our guest today, wah Shoot. His memoir Stay True, is now available on paperback wherever you get your books. We'll be sure to include a link to that and more in our show notes at talk easypod dot com. For more conversations with other great writers, I check out our talks with Zadi Smith, Ocean Wong, Joompulahirie, Jennifer Egan, and min Jin Lee to hear those and more Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You could also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at Talk Easypod. If you want to drop us a line, you can write us at SF at talk easypod dot com. That's SF at talk easypond dot com. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come and Cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with writer Fran Leebowitz who can do so at talk easypond dot com slash shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenni sa Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Our research and production assistant is Paulina Suarez. Today's talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editors are Clarice Gavara, c J. Mitchell and Lindsay Ellis. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Schenlan. I also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julie Barton, John Starr's, Kerrie Brody, David Glover, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabella and Narveez, Kira Posey, Tara Machado, Maya Cana, Jason Gambrell, Lee, Tom Mallade, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.
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