goat
This week I read Goat by Brad Land. (Here’s a review/ plot summary.)
It’s a memoir about Brad as a college student that gets abducted, beat up and has his car stolen. He’s pretty traumatized by the event.
A year later he joins his brother at Clemson, where the brother’s joined a fraternity. Brad decides to join the same fraternity. The hazing that follows gets to him and gets mixed up in his head with his previously trauma and he starts having nightmares every night and shaking constantly.
It’s a fast read and well-written. I was (technically) in a fraternity but even by MIT standards it was a bit of an outlier. By the time I was a senior I still hadn’t ever seen a keg in real life and we were more likely to have a discussion about LEDs or carbon nano tubes than getting drunk or getting lucky. And people didn’t even memorize our frat’s poems or history, let alone go through any more serious hazing. I knew this sort of thing went on and probably still goes on, but the details, the specifics were shocking.
All in all, it was pretty unsettling.
It also made me want to write a memoir of my college years. I’ve been thinking about this since about my sophomore year. I think it could be a good story.