In “It’s Time to Sweat It Out and Get Pumped With Alison Bechdel,” Elizabeth Weil reviews Alison Bechdel’s (CRF 2014) new graphic memoir entitled The Secret to Superhuman Strength.
Bechdel’s new work asks life’s big questions, turning to the author’s relationship with exercise and a lifelong interest in what connects mind and body: “What are we doing in this often undignified circus that is life? What the hell is going on with our ridiculous bodies and our even more ridiculous relationship between our bodies and minds? How is anybody supposed to get through 30, 40, 50, 60 (!) years with some modicum of grace on this sweaty, crusty orb? What happens when progressing upward, toward greater heights of achievement, ceases to be a realistic goal? How do you respond when you’ve spent your whole life trying to get fitter, faster, stronger and you start getting slower and weaker anyway?
…The Secret to Superhuman Strength is a far more sprawling project than Bechdel’s two previous and entirely virtuosic graphic memoirs: Fun Home, about her father, and Are You My Mother?, about her mother. The format is larger, too, and the reader feels more space on the page to breathe, which can’t be a random choice. (One imagines very little about the art Bechdel puts out into the world is random.)”
Read the full review here.