Crashing America

American author Katia Noyes’s novel Crashing America (2005) chronicles the cross-country exploits of a 17-year-old woman who leaves her hometown of San Francisco, California in search of peace and quiet, only to become wrapped up in various criminal acts. For Crashing America, Noyes received a Lambda Literary Award nomination for Best Lesbian Fiction Debut.

Set in 1999, the book's protagonist is a 17-year-old San Francisco resident who calls herself Girl. She and her friends often enunciate the name by emphasizing the "R" in Girl like a growl, a reference to the riot grrl punk movement of the 1990s. Girl, descended from hippies and anti-Vietnam War protesters, seeks to live a lifestyle that captures those counterculture ideals, despite the fact that her own mother killed herself at a young age by shooting herself in the head. For a time, Girl lives in the chicken coop outside her father's home, mostly to escape his latest girlfriend, Marianne, and her children. She later runs away, staying in her grandfather's apartment. One day, Girl finds herself locked out of her grandfather's home by the building's suspicious landlady, Mrs. Jam, who says her grandfather no longer wants her living there. Now a homeless delinquent living on the streets of the city's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Girl begins to prostitute herself to earn money to buy food and drugs. Most nights, she sleeps on the sidewalk, though occasionally one of her tricks will allow her to stay the night. Girl also frequently breaks into cars to sleep inside.

One day, Girl's best friend, Cara, dies after being accidentally electrocuted by a light rail deep within San Francisco's subway tunnels. When this happens, Girl decides to leave behind San Francisco in search of a quieter kind of existence in the Midwest. Having never believed she would reach her 18th birthday, the prospect of living past this milestone scares her. "Somehow I had to make my longings into something real. Maybe then, and only then, I wouldn't have to disappear like my mom."



Girl sets out for Nebraska where her old friend Randa lives on a corn farm with her boyfriend, Bill, and his extended family. As she hitchhikes across America, Girl stops in Salt Lake City where she engages in a brief sexual affair with a bored and lonely housewife. She also spends time cavorting with a born-again Christian punk rocker and his teenaged waitress girlfriend.

Finally, Girl reaches Randa, Bill, and Bill's family who are busy harvesting the crops on their enormous corn farm. As Girl throws herself into the labor—arguably the first honest work she has ever done—with a kind of Puritan zeal, she begins to envision a simple Midwestern life rooted in family, tradition, and hard work. This newfound passion is rooted in a connection to nature and the sense of awe it inspires in Girl's heart. “Sometimes I got overwhelmed by all those cornstalks and their floppy green leaves. When I looked down at the dirt under my feet, I felt something vicious and excessive in the way the earth pushed up stalk after stalk, over and over again, more and more life. And there I was, helping it continue.”

Nevertheless, when Randa gives her a loaded pistol for protection, Girl begins to feel the draw of wanderlust anew, as well as the death-drive that propelled her through most of her young life. She abandons the farm, steals a car, and embarks upon a solo Bonnie and Clyde mission on her way to Memphis, Tennessee. As she moves from one victim to the next, always changing stolen vehicles every hundred miles or so, Girl picks up a fellow traveler for her illicit road-trip: Jessika, a teenaged Jesus freak and punk fan. In most cases, however, her sexual affairs are short-lived, as she generally robs her sexual partners shortly after the act of fornication. Some of her sexual partners are older, like the Salt Lake City housewife, and these interactions take on a vibe of maternity as Girl grieves for the mother she never really knew.



A sort of inversion of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Crashing America is a wild road-trip novel and lesbian romance about escaping California and finding peace in the Midwest.