Sexing the Political: A journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality : Godspeed

Volume One Number Two, June 2001

Godspeed by Lynn Breedlove
St. Martin's Press
Reviewed by Melisse Gelula

Godspeed, the title of Lynn Breedlove's first novel, is a religious pun---a personal cult of addiction and despair, and a way of talking about what the speedfreak's high is about. Begun 9 years ago as a short story in a workshop with the late Kathy Acker, the novel's mesmerizing pace

almost chases Jim, a punk trannie dyke, through her passions---boundlessly careening her bike through San Francisco, tracking down and shooting up drugs, and getting the girl she loves---all of which involve getting somewhere she's both already been and never visited. Childish Jim finds poetry and peace in this trivium, her hardcore behaviors softened by Breedlove's genuine and likable characterization of a bad boy with a soul. When Jim gives up San Francisco and walks away from her girl for a job as a punk-band roadie, the journey on the road disrupts her vigilant inner odyssey of destruction. But the familiar narrative that this rather autobiographical story could take never holds. And this is good thing. Instead, a breathless journey continues, in a queer Trainspotting kind of way, with a soft message of hope for a damaged dyke whose last mistake is not yet made. (St.Martin's, 2002). For more information or to buy the book, see www.tribe8.com/godspeed

Melisse Gelula is, among other things, an editor at Random House. She is a former rape crisis and domestic violence counselor and is now studying psychoanalysis in New York.