Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm joined by writer Wah Shoe. For the past two decades,

Shoe has written about culture and music for a variety of publications, by magazine Grantland the village voice the Atlantic and the

New Yorker where he's been a staff writer since 2017 and last year in 2022, he published his memoir entitled Stay True.

The title came from Shoe's Friend, Ken, who would sometimes use the titular phrase to sign off letters or emails.

Shoe and Ken met at UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s. They had pretty much nothing in common.

For starters, Ken loved Pearl Jam, while Shoo, 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

U.S. for generations.

Shoo, on the other hand, was the 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 an allergy.

Because three years after they met,

Ken was killed in a carjacking incident. It was brutal and sudden and completely

senseless, which is why Shoe has tried to make sense of it for the past 24 years. The result is a truly singular memoir,

one that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize 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

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