Fast Girl
Don't Brake Until You See the Face of God and Other Good Advice from the Racetrack
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Life in Ingrid Steffensen’s New Jersey suburb was safe, comfortable, and predictable. A college professor, wife, and mother of a preadolescent daughter, her carefully cultivated world was comprised of the usual suspects: family, work, book clubs, yoga classes, and date nights. Then, one day—thinking she’d be a good sport and maybe learn something about what made her car-crazed husband tick—she put a helmet on her head, took her Mini Cooper to the racetrack, and learned how to drive it really, really fast. Soon, what began as a whim became a full-blown obsession—and a freeing journey of self-discovery.
In the eventful, exhilarating year that followed her first lesson, Steffenson dove head-first into high-performance driving. In the process, she discovered the terrifying and addictive thrill of pushing her limits, learning an entirely new set of skills, and tackling danger head-on—and found that doing so liberated her in a way that she hadn’t even known she needed. Fast-paced and fun, Fast Girl is the quirky, real-life chronicle of how one woman stepped outside her comfort zone, shrugged off the shackles of suburban conformity, and changed her entire perspective on life through the unlikeliest of means: racecar driving.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
High-performance driving at terrific speeds has proved the elixir to the "Mommy Mind," as New Jersey professor of art and architecture Steffensen writes in this cheeky, voluble memoir. A busy professional, wife to her evidently wealthy and devoted high school sweetheart, Mr. B, and mother to the Divine Miss M, Steffensen was living a comfortable, complacent life in New Jersey suburbs when her husband introduced her to his addictive hobby: car racing. From her first weekend at Watkins Glen International Raceway in upstate New York to later mastery of the tortuous Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia, she was hooked on the adrenaline high and the diesel fumes. Through vigorous instruction both in the classroom and in her Mini Cooper her husband later bought her a Lotus Elise Steffensen learned the geometry of the Line, driving in the rain, the sacred etiquette of passing, the necessity of vehicular maintenance, and how to shrug off the testicular language of the track rats. In her entertaining, tongue-in-cheek sendup of the self-help confessional, she writes of the feminist release, Zen-like concentration, and simple fun of high-performance driving, while downplaying (but still honestly addressing) the environmental toll and sheer wastefulness of this speedy sport.
