Excerpt from the new issue: Christopher Fraser on Monsters University:
“Now that a couple of years have passed, I wonder what sort of person I might have become had I chosen a different path through university. The scene where dozens of societies are vying for Mike’s attention is painfully familiar to me. I ended up sticking with a couple of societies devoted to hollow student activism and edited a student fiction anthology, but as it happens I found my inspiration elsewhere. Had I been a little more gutsy, I might have gotten into improv. If I drank more, I could have tolerated the long-haired headbangers. If I hadn’t fallen in love with someone who had the audacity to live three thousand miles away, I might have been on some ludicrous gap year to Kenya.
I think, once you get to college, your opportunities for really screwing up are beginning to dry up. Even if you drop out, it’s never as damning a sentence as failing high school. These alternative, parallel-universe versions of me are interesting, certainly, but no more appealing than the life I ended up living. There is a version of me who is chained to the gates of an arms manufacturer and believes he is doing God’s work. There is, almost definitely, a parallel life where I’m backpacking around North Africa, intoxicated by a dozen new experiences every day. But instead, I spent my time at university solidifying a relationship, and then moved to the USA and got married once it was over. This version of me is just as happy as the rest.”
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That’s me, that is!