As the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival returns January 28–30, 2026, Coachella Magazine is revisiting a highlight from the 2025 event—a thoughtful, in-person conversation with Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author Hua Hsu. During the discussion, Hsu reflected on friendship, grief, identity, and the creative process behind his acclaimed memoir, Stay True.
“My name is Hua Hsu. I’m author of Stay True,” he said. The book, he explained, “is a memoir about friendship and being young and lost.” At its center is the loss of a close friend during his college years and “the years that followed and my own kind of unfolding feelings about it.”
Writing the memoir proved to be far more emotionally complex than Hsu initially expected. “It was very up and down,” he shared. While he had long anticipated revisiting old notes and memories, “I wasn’t prepared for how emotional it would make me.” Writing the book in his forties meant reflecting not only on who he once was, but on “everything that my friend was unable to experience.” The process was painful, but not without joy. “It was sad, but it was also a kind of joyous experience, too, because I got to revisit so many good memories,” he said, describing the experience as “a lot more tumultuous than I thought it would be.”
At the heart of Stay True is Hsu’s friendship with Ken—an unlikely bond that becomes clearer and more complicated in hindsight. Looking back, Hsu said the experience reshaped how he sees his younger self. “I think that I’m the butt of many jokes in the book,” he said, noting that revisiting the past made him realize “how just kind of needlessly pretentious I was.” That reflection only deepened his admiration for his friend. “It made me feel like even more admiration and awe for him,” he added, even as he admitted to “cringing” at who he once was.
Hsu also reflected on growing up as a first-generation American and how that shaped both his worldview and his writing. “There weren’t that many books growing up… that reflected the experience that I felt I was having,” he said. Rather than discouraging him, that absence became liberating. “There were no models for me to follow, and in some ways that was very freeing… to just realize that I could write my own story without having to follow what people had done before.”
Music and pop culture weave throughout Stay True, serving as emotional anchors and identity markers. “When we’re young, we’re just eager to become who it is we want to become,” Hsu said. Growing up in the 1990s, that process was shaped by “the CDs I was buying, or the magazines I was reading, the books I was reading.” While he admits he may have placed “maybe too much” importance on what he and his friends consumed, he sees that impulse as universal. “That’s a pretty eternal quest for young people,” he said.
Hsu’s creative process thrives on movement, noise, and interruption. “Driving used to be pretty central” to his thinking, he explained, but now running serves that role. Unlike writers who crave silence, Hsu finds inspiration in stimulation. “I kind of need there to be music, sound… I don’t mind being interrupted,” he said, adding that life’s interruptions help ground his work. “What I’m trying to write often is about being alive.” For him, clarity comes from structure. “I really need to know how a piece of writing is gonna begin or end,” he said. “If I figure one of those things out, then the rest is a lot easier.”
The extraordinary reception of Stay True took Hsu by surprise. Personally, he said, the accolades didn’t fundamentally change him. “Finishing it was sort of the gift that I was looking for,” he explained. The book began as a private reckoning. “I literally just did it for myself.” That readers connected so deeply with it was unexpected. “The fact that this thing I did for myself actually reaches or affects other people is still very strange to me,” he said. Professionally, the success has complicated his next steps. “It’s made it harder for me to figure out what to do next,” he admitted.
When asked about the biggest challenge he faces as a writer, Hsu didn’t hesitate. “Finding stories,” he said. As a journalist, he thrives when assigned. “Once someone gives me a story, I love every aspect of reporting and meeting people,” he said, but generating pitches on his own doesn’t come as easily. “Some people are just better at it than others.”
His advice to young writers reflects both realism and humility. With today’s media landscape dramatically changed, Hsu encouraged emerging writers to look beyond traditional centers of power. “Sometimes writers think that they need to be somewhere high profile to write meaningful stories,” he said, but meaningful stories are everywhere. “Any small town, there’s probably a very compelling set of stories that people outside of that town want to read.”
At its core, what Hsu loves most about being a writer is learning. “The opportunity to call someone up and ask them questions… it’s my favorite part,” he said. Though an introvert by nature, writing pushes him outward. “It allows me to learn something about the world… and about other people too.”
At the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Hua Hsu’s reflections offered a quiet reminder of why personal stories resonate so widely: when told honestly, they become shared experiences—about friendship, loss, and the enduring search for meaning.
Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
January 28-30, 2026
Rancho Mirage Library and Observatory