In each of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs, there’s a moment, early on, when she is physically elevated—and seems to survey the sprawl of her own story below her. “Fun Home” (2006) begins with young Alison raised above her father, arms spread, while he holds up her stomach with socked feet. (The gastrointestinal discomfort, Bechdel writes, is “worth the moment of perfect balance.”) When Alison looks down, her father’s gaze meets hers: a mirror. “Are You My Mother?” (2012) opens with a dream sequence, in which an older Bechdel pauses by the bank of a river. The deep water is “murky”; she hesitates and then, overcome by what she describes as “a sublime feeling of surrender,” jumps in, her body sinking through the darkness. And in Bechdel’s newest book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), preteen Alison, poised on top of a ski slope, regards the pristine expanse of the Allegheny Plateau. “I sensed my whole life spooling out before me,” she writes. The preceding pages are a blur of activity, but here the world stands still.
These junctures, full of the anticipation and terror of becoming a person, are notable for their ambivalence. But I am more struck by their detachment, their motionlessness, and the way those things illustrate a kind of physics of autobiography: it’s easier to define that which is not moving, and that which is separate from you. Bechdel, now sixty, has made a career out of standing outside or above her life. She often conjures her younger self as a worried wisp with a bowl cut, crouched over a sheet of drawing paper. In “Superhuman Strength,” tucked into the corner of the Allegheny spread, is a square that depicts a girl drafting an analogous scene in pen and crayon. Her lines—sharp and cheerful, as if in rebuke to the moody wash of snow beyond—evince a hard-won tidiness, a heartbreaking fear of the flux of life.
The impulse to pin things down makes sense: in Bechdel, definitions, particularly autobiographical ones, have a habit of migrating. Her first comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which began in 1983, reclaimed the slur of the title, gently studying a group of lesbians living together in an unnamed town. Bechdel’s alter ego, Mo, a librarian prone to baroque kvetches, was one of several interconnected protagonists. With her next two works, “Fun Home” (her dad book) and “Are You My Mother?” (her mom book), Bechdel turned the lens further inward, helping to create the genre of the full-length graphic memoir. “The tragicomedy of narcissism is her big subject,” Judith Thurman wrote in this magazine in 2012. But, if Bechdel writes only about herself, the nature and borders of that self remain hazy. A parent can be a looking glass, a foil, or a prophecy, and Bechdel, whose numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, pursues self-knowledge by way of the family romance. The question “Who am I?,” for her, often wears the guise of “Who are you?”
On that front, Bechdel’s parents were fruitfully mysterious. Bruce, a mortician and a high-school English teacher, concealed his homosexuality from his three children, and died at the age of forty-four; Helen, a devoted amateur actor, cultivated a chilly reserve. (When Alison was seven, her mother informed her that she was too old for a good-night kiss.) In her parent memoirs, Bechdel probes a central bond while placing her tale in conversation with several source texts. The densely allusive “Fun Home” summons Henry James, Proust, and Shakespeare in the span of a few pages; in “Are You My Mother?,” D. W. Winnicott presides over a congress of psychoanalysts, including Jung and Freud. The books feel deeply invested in relation: between Bechdel and the characters who loomed large in her childhood, and between Bechdel and her intellectual progenitors, the monuments over which she has trained her thoughts to grow.
In “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” Bechdel examines a different kind of relation, one with an activity: exercise. She’s a lifelong acolyte. And this time the figures in the wings are Romantics, monks, and Beat poets—those concerned with nature and the sublime. This is apt: Bechdel casts her fitness obsession as a quest for transcendence. But what does she want to transcend? The book seems to qualify or resist certain tendencies in Bechdel’s work, but it may be more accurate to say that Bechdel is resisting the consequences of her own definition of selfhood. For her, the individual cannot be disentangled from the rest of the world—not from her parents, who produced her (and whom she, perhaps, reproduces, in pen-and-ink), or from anyone else. “Superhuman Strength” posits exercise as the cure for such interdependence. Physical exertion sweeps Bechdel up, and affords her a respite not only from ego but from the “other” that ego entails. It suspends the need to relate at all.
When the curtain lifts, though, fitness seems to be less about fleeing the self than reifying it. Each chapter corresponds to a decade; the story marches in chronological order from the “1960s/00s” through the “2010s/50s.” We are immediately lodged in time, and cognizant of the body’s frailty as it hurtles, in Bechdel’s words, “toward that granite slab. Disease. Dementia. Dependence. Death.” (Despite the subject matter, she’s rarely sounded so cheerful—her introduction has the unhinged peppiness of a “Sit and Be Fit” instructor.) As a kid, Bechdel dreamed of indestructibility. Poring over the bodybuilding ads in her comic books—the beginning of a “lifelong fixation with muscles”—she coveted the models’ “brute physical power.” Stories of climbing entranced her (“A mountain is one of the most ancient symbols of the self,” she notes helpfully), as did a Russian fitness manual she found lying around the house. With her parents’ bemused tolerance, Bechdel took up skiing, jumping rope, calisthenics, and running.
There is something unavoidably defensive about a queer, anxiety-ridden teen-ager trying, through gains in strength and speed, to construct an “impregnable ego”—the word choice alone—but Bechdel’s early flirtations with exercise were also bound up in desire. The book doubles, charmingly, as a trek through the wonders of athletic gear: clomping snow boots, the “alluringly asexual plimsoll line” of a deck shoe. “I felt a kind of lust for those Brooks Villanovas,” Bechdel admits, reliving the joy of graduating to a purpose-built running sneaker. In high school, she discovers the “hardy, unisex” accents of L. L. Bean; a decade later, Patagonia steals her loyalty, along with “a not inconsiderable portion of my monthly income.” (She describes the brand’s double-fabric canvas shorts as “practically sentient.”) This emphasis on texture, on materiality, suggests that Bechdel’s youthful experiments with fitness may have allowed her to explore a sensuous physicality that would otherwise have remained off limits.
As Bechdel gets older, exercise also enables her to numb emotions that her mind deems too dangerous. Her father kills himself when she is nineteen (the deep wound of “Fun Home”), and Bechdel responds by finding a new, on-the-nose fitness enthusiasm: karate. She marvels, at one point, at how well she is weathering her trauma; her only suffering is physical. In one panel, sinking into the bathtub after class, she takes stock of the full range of her hurt: “The dull pain of bruises. The acute pain of blisters. An exquisite tenderness that suffused parts of my body I’d never been aware of before.” This Cartesian outsourcing works for a while. But, when Bechdel throws a punch at a stranger in the subway (he groped her first) and gets socked in return, she realizes how exhausting her armor has become. “I did not want to fight,” she observes—with others or, by denying the crush of bereavement, with herself.
Instead, Bechdel enrolls in a yoga class. Rather than “looking out, at an enemy, we were looking in,” she writes, adding, “With great anatomical specificity.” Although the introspective focus and the technical expertise are energizing, they bring along a whiff of false consciousness. “Karate gave me a carapace,” Bechdel notes. “Yoga pried it off and left me raw and pulsing!” The exclamation point betrays her inner exercise maniac, the happy sergeant all too eager to mistake physical sensations for spiritual transformation. In the end (spoiler alert), yoga does not cure Bechdel or liberate the far reaches of her psyche. But it does unlock an approach to discomfort, a curiosity toward what aches. “By simply being with my sensations, I could feel them not as ‘pain’ but as a flux of tinglings, pulses, and vibrations,” she writes. “As my yoga practice deepened, my cartoons grew less superficial, more like real life.”
This revelation drives home something at once obvious and profound: the extent to which Bechdel’s comics are also, for her, an exercise program. Both the physical labor of fitness and the creative labor of memoir activate Bechdel’s perfectionism, soothe her fear of death, involve a sort of micromanagement of her physique (whether on the page or on the mat), and demand gruelling repetition. (Bechdel has often described her artistic process—taking photographs that she copies and recopies—as laborious; the stories themselves proceed in careful iterative squares.) Of course, Bechdel’s comics have always formally mirrored the subject that they address. The grid takes the shape that she needs it to take. When Bechdel was writing about her parents—about a filial journey of embrace and disengagement—she could both capture her family on the page and hold them at arm’s length. It makes sense that now, as Bechdel considers fitness, her drawing practice would reconfigure itself as a regimen, a routine of self-improvement and self-care.
Partway through “Superhuman Strength,” in the chapter on her thirties, Bechdel has a breakthrough in the gym while struggling with a draft of her dad book. She’s mastered the pullup. “I was literally pulling my own weight!” she crows. “Entirely self-sufficient!” The announcement sets off readerly alarm bells. When “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” invoked the myth of the solitary self, the aim was only to disassemble it. In this book, too, Bechdel’s most rewarding experiences with exercise tend to involve getting lost rather than getting ripped. She sweats in order to be absorbed, even annulled, by a state of poetic concentration. Skiing as a girl, Bechdel is transfixed by the “flow” of descending the slope, the “liquid ease” she can attain when she stops worrying about falling down. (“Soon,” she writes, “I would become nearly paralyzed with thoughts of achievement, thoughts of self.”) And the first time she completes three loops of her three-mile running route, plus “another short stint to make it ten miles,” her euphoria feels tinged with the mystical. In the full-page illustration, boxes of text float against an aerial map of Bechdel’s circuit. One says, “Transcend: to pass beyond the limits of.” Another: “The boundary of my very self seemed to dissolve as I merged with the humid evening air.” Bechdel appears unstuck from time—and from the parts of her personality that often stymie her. It is an early hint of a distinction that will become important to her: between the hoped-for results of exercise (a perfected self and body) and the hoped-for experience of it (oceanic, edgeless).
This feeling of egolessness (even in the service of ego) beckons Bechdel for much of the memoir. Her favorite part of karate, she later reflects, may have been not the empowerment but the “experience of union as we moved and breathed in sync, in a collective trance.” At times, the book seems to critique the solipsism of fitness; as if to model more outward-facing priorities, Bechdel turns her personal exercise journey into a cultural study of workout fads from the sixties to today. Like a Forrest Gump of sweat and fettle, she appears on treadmills and ellipticals; in spin classes, Pilates studios, and dance gyms; twisting around aerial swings, climbing walls, and shimmying down ropes; doing a “high-intensity interval training” (hiit) plan called Insanity; and even trying the Times’ “Scientific 7-Minute Workout.” “What gnawing void propels this cardiopulmonary frenzy?” Bechdel wonders, in the frantic tone of a salesman promising washboard abs. “The spiritual and moral bankruptcy of late capitalism? The disembodiment of our increasingly virtual existence?”
As the question suggests, Bechdel is interested in a broader American story. “Superhuman Strength” evolves against a backdrop of landmark historical moments. (A small taste: the book takes note of the publication of “Silent Spring,” the lunar landing, the passage of Title IX, and the Presidencies of Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump.) A hinge point for Bechdel arrives when, during her preteen years, her dad brings home “The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” by Stewart Brand, which features a mixture of eco-essays and crunchy product reviews. Brand, Bechdel writes, believed that “we are all part of something bigger . . . some pulsating and intricately connected totality.” The catalogue kindles Bechdel’s environmentalism and her first intimations of global interdependence. It also prefigures her interest in Transcendental traditions, which this memoir repeatedly invokes. As the cartoon decades pile up, Bechdel’s guiding spirits are not iconic gurus like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jane Fonda. They’re Coleridge and the Wordsworth siblings, locked in Alpine enchantment; and, in the States, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, developing a strand of ecological progressivism that extended to the Beats and the hippies. The result is an amusingly—yet sincerely—highbrow perspective on the shredding of the gnar. After a Nordic skiing expedition brings her face to face with a bursting dam, Bechdel quotes Emerson: “All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all.”
In her fifties, Bechdel begins work on a new book: “a light, fun memoir about my athletic life that I could bang out quickly.” But, toward the end of “Superhuman Strength,” her progress stalls. She’s not actually sure what she wants to say. It seems possible—both from the ambitious work that we are now reading and from the portrait of the artist which emerges within it—that Bechdel may be constitutionally incapable of writing a “light, fun memoir.” The problem isn’t a lack of humor. (She is frequently hilarious.) It’s that “Superhuman Strength” feels anxious to outstrip its premise, to keep gathering references and data points until the entirety of the human condition is accounted for.
The book is vertiginously busy. Bechdel, when she’s not exercising, grapples with fame and feelings of fraudulence, and, heartrendingly, with the death of her mother. Romantic relationships begin and end. There are detours into Eastern spiritual practice, including meditation, acupuncture, and the teachings of the Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki. There is a thread on the lure of substance abuse—at various times, Bechdel is dependent on alcohol and sleeping pills—and we hear about Coleridge’s laudanum addiction and Kerouac’s binge-drinking. In general, rather than tease out a few parallels with her tutelary figures, Bechdel maps their lives closely onto her own. When she joins an open relationship, she suggests that several of the Romantic and Beat poets, by engaging in “transitive intimacy” with the sisters and wives of their male friends, also dabbled in a kind of polyamory. When she falls into a pattern of “free running,” or keeping a sleep schedule that is not dictated by light and dark, Bechdel notes that—aha!—her Romantic counterparts, too, slept into the daytime and stirred at night.
The effect is of being caught inside an endlessly branching consciousness. No detail fails to glow with meaning; everything is related to everything else. Bechdel writes about this, too. The attempt to encompass the world, she implies, does not reveal a maximalist impulse so much as it does a difficulty in locating the boundary where one thing ends and another begins. In particular, Bechdel believes, she struggles to distinguish between self and other, a habit that she also attributes to Wordsworth, who gazed upon the Alps and saw—in those “black drizzling crags”—“something of the workings of his own mind.” Later, Bechdel wrestles with the repercussions of 9/11 while continuing to work on her dad book. What does it mean, she wonders, to demonize a person or a group of people for embodying the things you hate about yourself? She grows fascinated by “that curious confusion of inside and outside, of self and other, known as ‘projection.’ ”
It’s a revealing moment. In projection, a person essentially replaces the person being projected upon with a version of her (the projector’s) self. Such a prospect—that relation will tip over into identity, and then subsumption—sends shock waves of pleasure and terror through much of Bechdel’s work. One paradox of “Superhuman Strength” is that, in order to short-circuit the self-other transaction, with its potential to annihilate the self, Bechdel seeks to lose herself, to leave herself behind. This makes her disposition toward exercise not only fundamentally defensive but slightly tragic. When I reached the spread in the book showing Bechdel’s ten-mile loop, I thought about the oft-cited difference between running toward and running from, and about the fragility of that dividing line. To claim that Bechdel is running toward transcendence—a seemingly triumphal statement—may just be a more complicated way of saying that she is running away from all the things she wishes to transcend.
Can exercise ever be a movement toward? Or is it always preventive, something difficult we do to preëmpt something worse? During the pandemic, endless tips for staying active have been volleyed in the direction of our mental breakdowns (incipient or ongoing). I, who hate running, got into the habit of taking long, slow lopes around my neighborhood, and the high they conferred was always an absence: of stress, sadness, or shame. But there may be power in such psychological housekeeping. A contrast exists between phrases like “superhuman strength” or “perfection” (another favorite of Bechdel’s) and the modest, pleasingly pragmatic word “fitness.” If you’re inclined to stand motionless above your own life, one achievement of exercise might be to restore you to your body. Perhaps, as Bechdel writes near the end of her memoir, transcending her story was never the right goal—better to work it out. ♦
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