What I’m Reading: Fast Girl

Fast Girl, a memoir written by former American Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton, is the bizarre story of an American sweetheart turned escort. This former Olympic athlete had a dream lifestyle few could ever hope for, but instead of being content with it, Suzy chose to sell her body to the night in Vegas. Suzy risked her lovely life (and the lives of her loved ones) to have sex with strangers for money she didn’t need. Shockingly, Suzy’s college sweetheart husband permitted this arrangement, thereby enabling Suzy to lead a double life until she was caught in the act, ending it all in the most public way possible.

Suzy Favour Hamilton was born and raised in the Midwest to a conservative family. She was an outstanding runner who won a college scholarship for her running ability and became an American sports icon as a young woman. Suzy competed in the three consecutive Olympics in the 1990s and at the turn of the 21st century, though an Olympic Gold medal would elude her. Still, she obtained sports contracts and sponsors and seemed stable and content.

Shortly after college, Suzy married her college sweetheart, Mark Hamilton, and they soon welcomed a daughter. Mark eventually built a thriving real estate business to support their family, and the two seemed to have built a beautiful life together. But the picture-perfect family was a facade for Suzy’s unhappiness. After two decades of marriage and a young daughter, Suzy and her husband decided at midlife to celebrate their twentieth anniversary with a trip to Las Vegas. At Suzy’s suggestion, they went skydiving and hired a female escort. Mark was less interested in this prospect than Suzy but enjoyed the experience all the same.

Unfortunately for Mark, he soon learned that opening up his marriage with an escort in Vegas simultaneously opened a Pandora’s box for Suzy. Suzy grew to have an insatiable appetite for further trips to Vegas, even without Mark. Before long, she went from hiring escorts sans Mark to becoming one herself. Mark surprisingly permitted Suzy to live part-time in Vegas working as an escort while he held down the fort at home caring for their young daughter and paying all the bills. Suzy came and went as she pleased, although Mark warned her that she would eventually be found out. Suzy did not heed her husband’s warnings nor seem to care. She found the adrenaline high she got from sleeping with strangers and earning thousands of dollars to do so was like a drug addiction.

Throughout the book, Suzy explains away and justifies her bizarre, dangerous choices of abandoning her family to have sex with strangers as a chemical imbalance–bipolar disorder. The fly in this ointment to many readers may be the reality that choosing sex work when you are already wealthy with a family seems selfish and sick. Suzy defends her actions by spending a few chapters on how she had been diagnosed with bipolarism even before becoming an escort. Suzy had been put on a medication that caused some patients to be hypersexual as a side effect. However, being hypersexual does not correlate to sexually suicidal behavior and working as an escort.

The shocking part of the book is not that Suzy made the dangerous choices she did, but rather that her husband, Mark, who comes across as stable and focused on their daughter, enabled her to do so. Instead of divorcing Suzy, having an intervention to stop her, or telling his family about her activities to get support, Mark seems to idly stand by and let her have her cake and eat it too. Suzy leads a double life as a prostitute in Vegas and a Midwestern wife and mother with Mark for months. What eventually stops her from continuing this twisted double life is not the threat of losing her daughter, nor the threat of being raped or killed by one of her Johns, but rather an undercover reporter for The Smoking Gun who publishes an article on her sex work.

BOTTOM LINE: Fast Girl is an action packed trip into the mind of a delusional narcissist who believes her disease protects her from any culpability. Her husband, Mark, comes across as a weak and disengaged partner who protects Suzy from any culpability. Since the publication of the book, Mark has spoken out on TV shows and on yahoo.com in Suzy’s defense, enabling her delusion that her bipolar diagnosis and drugs explain away all of her sexually selfish choices that could very well killed her or those closest to her.