New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu began writing his Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Stay True 25 years ago, even if he didn’t realize it at the time. “It wasn’t writing that I necessarily thought would become a book someday,” says Hsu. He started recording his thoughts the night he heard that his best friend, Ken, had been murdered in a senseless act of violence while the pair were college students at the University of California, Berkeley. “It was just my own method of coping.” 

Stay True is a beautiful tribute to a formative friendship and led Hsu in surprising directions. “It was very unexpected to end up in a place that felt far more hopeful than I thought would be possible when I set out to write back in 1998,” Hsu says on a video call from upstate New York. There we...