Alison Bechdel is the author of Fun Home, a bestselling graphic memoir that details bittersweet revelations made by her distant father in his final days. “A masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds” (Time), Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical. Running from 1983 to 2008, her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip garnered a cult following and critical acclaim as one of the earliest depictions of lesbians in pop culture. She is also the author of a graphic memoir about her mother and is the creator of the Bechdel Test, which measures the representation and agency of women in film and literature. Named the Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, her other honors include MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, an Eisner Award, and a Stonewall Book Award.
In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel offers a comic account of her lifelong fascination with exercise. Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the ’60s (“Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!”) to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.
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