College Girl: A Memoir by Laura Gray-Rosendale

College Girl: A Memoir Reviews

• 
  Nicole

  This is a tremendous book. It is brave and smart and even funny, which is a testament to the author's ability to create a great narrator through strong writing. I can't help but focus on the writerly aspects of the book. Gray-Rosendale does some much work by giving the people in the book archetypal names--College girl, raped-girl, the Snowies. Drone Bee. Tall Tree. It creates such voice in the narrator--it's Laura but not Laura--younger, crafted, fragmented. And the fragmentation is furthered by the short, staccato sentences. The actual fragments of sentences. The non-capitalization at the hardest parts. I love how angry this woman is from the almost-get-go and how she gains her voice more and more throughout the piece.
  The second half of the book is very different, in some ways displaying even more fully the fragmentation. The voice becomes much more clinical and academic--embracing what the narrator has become--a scholar of her own experience. A complex and smart book.
• 
  Nancy Rossman

  RAW< RAW, is how I need to start this review. The author drops us right into the horrific incident of a vicious rape in college. We feel her revulsion, fear, anger, and powerlessness. He beats her when she struggles, she screams and sometimes she only thinks she is and other times she really is. But it is not the event but the aftermath that the book is about. Her constant fear, even though he is arrested, that he is lurking because he told her he will find and kill her.
  
  Thus, the carefree life of a college girl is taken away. No joy, no dating, no laughter. She sleeps with the lights on, must have someone with her when she showers. She assumes this creep will get his just sentence until she learns that the perpetrator is the son (and grandson) of one of the most respected and biggest donors to Syracuse University. She unravels as the trial nears. She joins support groups and speaks out.
  
  It was tough reading as interspersed with the story are the staggering stats. (One in four women will be sexually abused in her lifetime). There is a lot of education, also, about how the justice system works in these cases and how the victim can be left in the dark.
  
  I hated reading all of that and yet know that the author is trying to educate other women as well as have this read be therapeutic and necessary to recover. It is just so heartbreaking. I do applaud her ability to write it, to share it no matter how much it must have sent her "back" in the telling. I do think that this sharing would be/could be a much needed survival plan for those who have been abused and don't know how to start to put things back together. It would surely help.
• 
  Emily

  I read this book for my human services class and I can honestly say this book changed me as a person, which I cannot say about many books. The reader follows the experience of Laura after she gets raped, and I really felt like I was going through everything with her. My favorite part was Laura's relationship with Lindsey. There was this one line “I’ll remember exactly how Lindsey bathed me, how much she loved me. I’ll remember how she cared for me like I was her own.” Seeing such a loving friendship truly makes me want to strive to be a better more supportive friend. I feel more empathetic and understanding towards sexual assault survivors and in general, as a result of this memoir. I highly recommend it
• 
  Kim

  Gray-Rosendale's memoir is unflinching and haunting. No reader could walk away from this book unaffected. Broken into two parts, the first part deals with her rape and its immediate aftermath, inviting readers into the most intimate and horrifying of traumatic and post-traumatic moments. Part two turns a reflective, academic lens on the event and the ways it affects not only the author, but her roommates and friends, for the rest of their lives. This book tells a compelling real-life horror story (I meant to just read a few pages, since I was in the middle of another book, but I couldn't put this one down), and it also transforms that story into an exploration of memory and trauma. It's a testament to the power of writing to help heal, and the value of choosing to expose and explore, rather than expel and ignore, the most painful memories. [It's also bound to cause intense fury at the various ways the legal system, university officials, psychologists, and a monied family utterly failed.]
• 
  Barbara

  This is a 4.5 in my eyes because it tackles such a personal experience so honestly and so vividly and because it is an important story that needed to be told. Often, there is the feeling in popular mythology--yes! still!--that someone who has been raped was "asking for it" or behaving provocatively or was inebriated or...While there have been some excellent fictional examinations of the impact of rape on its victims, especially in adolescent literature [Think about Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, for instance,] memoirs or accounts by academics have been few and far between. This one, the account of one college girl who was raped back in 1988 in Syracuse, goes very far in filling that void and is important just on those merits. But it goes far deeper. It shows how memories can trick us and how friends can save us, even after we've been degraded and almost destroyed physically and emotionally. How the author managed to ever venture onto city streets again is beyond me since the rape occurred in her apartment building in what should have been a safe area. Then again, are we ever really safe? While some naysayers might tell us that books like this only make us more fearful, I would disagree. They make us necessarily cautious and careful, yes, but they also help us see the resilience of a rape survivor and the courage it must have taken for this woman and others like her to refuse to let her rape define her. Yes, it was a life-changing experience, but she is much more than a college girl who was raped. She's a fighter, a survivor, and an example. I cannot imagine how much courage it took to revisit that night and those times and to learn once again of how the system betrayed her in many respects. Still, her story offers a beacon of hope for others as well as a call for change in how we deal with this particular crime. While it is undeniably Laura's story, it is also our story. I've wanted to read this book for a long time, but I knew it was not going to be easy going. Thus, I postponed my reading of it until finishing the semester when I figured I would have time to process it and engage with it on an emotional level rather than just ripping through it as quickly as possible. Every college girl out there--and yes, every college boy--needs to read this and begin a dialogue about the issues raised in this book. Filled with details that are hard to read and moments where even simple survival, much less healing, seem questionable, this book is well written, honest, and reflective.
• 
  Joe

  This memoir begins with a harrowing account of a brutal rape, and then powerfully shows the ways in which this act of violence follows and traumatizes the victim for many years. Perhaps victims is more accurate, as the book ends with a haunting series of interviews with the women who were also in the building when the event occurred. A culture and psychology of fear are skillfully evoked. Unfortunately the book is somewhat less successful in connecting the crime to sorts of academic theory popular in the 1990s.
• 
  Ryley Horner

  This book gives such an intimate understanding of Gray-Rosendale’s experience as a sexual assault survivor that it feels as if you are with her as it happened. This memoir is incredibly heavy, often requiring breaks because of how detailed and sometimes explicit it can be. However, the journey that she goes on to get through the experience and come out on the other side is emotional and inspiring. Not something I would have necessarily read on my own, but appreciative of my Feminist/Transgressive Memoir class for having this be required reading.
• 
  Luke

  College Girl is a deeply affecting read of brutality, honesty, courage, and empathy. There's little else I can add that doesn't seem to trivialize the events depicted in this beautiful memoir.
  
  
  
• 
  Barbra Lounsbury

  powerful, incredible, somatic, and if I were the person in charge of a curriculum, this would be required reading
• 
  Alida McDermott

  Life Changing
• 
  Elizabeth

  Memoirs are difficult in a way. Unlike fiction, there's no safety valve for the reader when things get intense. Instead, you keep coming back to the hard truth that "this really happened." When you know the author, the intensity increases, and you circle, again and again, to the realization that "this really happened, and it happened to a nice, beautiful, sweet person that I know."
  The author tells her story of a brutal rape. There are no motivations are explanations for the perpetrator taking this action. Yet she recovers.
  How can something like this happen? What are we supposed to learn from it? (Check our doors? Mistrust men? Sh** happens?)
  The story is hard. But our author emerges, finds love and happiness. It's not a pretty journey, and you, as a reader, may choose not to go on it with her. But in the end it transforms itself from a story of despair to a story of hope and light. Maybe it becomes a useful story, maybe it gives the reader just a shred more persistence, strength, and potency, to battle one's own demons.
  Just one word of caution; don't read it late at night.
• 
  Susan D'Entremont

  Very good book about by a Syracuse student who was raped in the 1980s and the affect it had on her and those around her for many years later. I was shocked at the lack of support by the police and her administration after the incident. I would like to think that nowadays a student who had this happen to them would have all sorts of follow-up, but perhaps I am being naive.
  
  There is one chapter towards the end of the book that doesn't really fit in with the rest of the narrative and is much more academic in tone. I think that should have gone at the end of the book. Otherwise, a thoughtful and well-written book. I could see it having a place in undergraduate sociology, criminal justice, psychology and womens studies classes.
  
  I don't want to give too much away, but will say that even cases that seem open and shut don't end the way you might think.
• 
  Cindy

  This is a very brave and honest account of an unthikable act. I imagine it will give great hope to others who have suffered a brutal injustice and live to tell about it. The author gives her account of the healing process that spans years, yet ends with her having an open heart. I'm stunned at the compassion she feels for the others who expereienced trauma that night, from her friends, roomates, and the police who documented the crime and saw the terrible aftermath. It takes a strong person to live through such an event and a beautiful person to come away from it a kind and compassionate soul.
• 
  Tracy Keller

  College Girl is an amazing, melodic and raw memoir of a young college girl's sexual assault and her subsequent recovery and resilience. I won't sugar coat it – her story is an extremely tough one to get through. But, it is also one that needs to be read, appreciated, and understood for its complexity in examining the discourse of trauma as well as the discourse of truth. What the author is able to do in a remarkably unrelenting and open way is to uncover her filtered and fragmented story and tell it with pure and simple honesty. It was an honor to read her story as well as a wonderful exploration of lost and found memories, buoyant friendships, and ultimately the spirit of surviving.
• 
  Caroline Mcphail-Lambert

  Tough read, especially for survivors of rape, sexual assault or abuse, but one that definitely adds to the positive strides that have been made in having these topics part of universal awareness to understand these horrific crimes.
  
  More than just a story about a college girl's rape, Gray-Rosendale explores how the memories of violence become a part of memoir writing narrative.
• 
  Betsy

  Difficult to read, considering that I know the author from work, but so amazingly worth it.
• 
  Beth Peyton

  This is a very important book. Deeply personal, wonderfully wrought story of a violent on-campus rape, and it's aftermath.
• 
  Patricia Murphy

  The author did a lot of hard work here that is important for other victims, especially the analysis of PTSD symptoms.