Salon.com
1.19.16 | Amanda Marcotte
Jon Krakauer speaks about the new edition of his book, "Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town"
Jon Krakauer released his latest book, “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” in April of 2015, in the midst of a multi-year resurgence of interest in the topic of acquaintance rape and efforts to reduce its incidence, especially on college campuses.
The book examines the issue through the lens of one small college town in Montana, a place that is notable mostly for how typical it is of college towns, all of which struggle with this problem on some level.
I interviewed Krakauer shortly before the release of the book in paperback recently to get his thoughts on the prevalence of rape, the debate over false accusations and how to fix the problem of rape culture. The text below is an edited version of our conversation.
Sexual assault, especially among people in their teens and 20s is, unfortunately, a really common crime around the country, so why did you make the book about Missoula, which is a small town in Montana?
It is. Although it is the second largest city in Montana. I wrote this book for very personal reasons. This young woman, who was very close to me, I learned she was raped and suffered decades of trauma and her life kind of blew up.
I started just researching the subject and I started following cases, about 30 cases around the country, and one of them happened in Missoula, and that is just a coincidence, that I came across a case that I was going to build a whole book around, the Allison Huguet case. Once I picked Missoula, I thought it was actually a really good place to write about because it was typical. It’s not an outlier; its problems are probably less than most cities and they’re handled better but it was still appalling to me. Missoula is a pretty accurate representation of the national problem.
