Seven titles about friendships in your 20s

Katherine Lin is an attorney and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.

You Can’t Stay Here Forever is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven books that have

friendships that, even if begun in childhood, remained significant in the early years of adulthood. The books remind me of my own friendships in my 20s, the ways we did right by each other, and the ways we let each other down. They remind me of racing to happy hour, finding your friend already waiting for you at the bar, and then spending the rest of the night talking about the person you hope to be. They remind me of growing up.

One title on the list:

Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu

Stay True, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, is heart-wrenching, brilliant, unforgettable. Hua Hsu writes about his unlikely friendship with Ken, whom he met as an undergraduate student at Berkeley. Hsu values obscurity, measures himself in defiance to popular culture and the mainstream. Ken is in a fraternity and once made Hsu wait with him at a mall for an Abercrombie and Fitch store to open so he could snag a jacket that was sold out everywhere else. Although Ken dies unbearably young, at twenty, Ken leaves an indelible mark on Hsu’s life—the kind made only possible by those rare friendships that shape your outlook on the world.

Stay True is a beautiful portrayal of coming of age, of a time where you were both overconfident and insecure, exploding with cynicism and hope, moving through the world under the spell that, maybe, unlike the generations before, you and your friends will figure it all out.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue