Charles Petzold

This book is exhausting! From the opening pages of The Secret to Superhuman Strength, we see Alison Bechdel exercising at home with vigorous variety, and then going to the gym where she’s climbing ropes and engaging with machines and lifting weights and doing yoga and pilates, and soon we’ll see her skiing and running and bicycling.

We may not have guessed from her two previous graphic memoirs that Alison Bechdel “is a bit of an exercise freak.” (p. 2) Not a jock or someone into sports, she hastens to add, but “the vigorous type” nonetheless, and her new book is a history of her infatuation with exercise and fitness. Only incidentally does it also present a panorama of the fitness movement over the past half century. Towards the end of The Secret to Superhuman Strength — this is not a plot spoiler! — a calendar on the wall indicates that it’s January 2013 when she reports “I began work on a new book, a light, fun memoir about my athletic life that I could bang out quickly” (p. 205).

This is not that book! Apparently Alison Bechdel discovered she had a much bigger story to tell. She obviously failed to “bang it out quickly” but in the process created a portrait of a life and an era and a quest that digs as deeply and as honestly as her memoirs about her father and mother, but is still fun and heartwarming and quite witty.

In its non-metaphorical sense, the title refers to an advertisement that Alison Bechdel saw in a Archies comic book when she was 9 for a book that cost $1.00. It turned out to be “a badly reprinted martial arts instruction booklet, laughingly beyond the comprehension of a child” (p. 49) but that does not stop her from attempting to achieve what that cheesy ad promised. In chapters that take us through the first six decades of Alison Bechdel’s life (conveniently corresponding to calendar decades), this mail-order book is just the beginning. By her early 20’s, Bechdel would revisit martial arts in a rigorous Women’s Center Karate Club, which a female sensei who had been kicked out of an all-male karate school “for insisting that women do knuckle push-ups like the men.” Soon Bechdel herself has achieved that skill: “All my life I’d been told women couldn’t do push-ups, and indeed, at first I couldn’t. But it wasn’t long before I was reeling off five, then ten, then twenty.” (p. 101) Meanwhile, Alison’s mother is devoted to the Jane Fonda Workout. Different church; same god.

Bechdel’s quest — and yes, Joseph Campbell is explicitly referenced — begins to encompass more than just bodily strength and athletic ability. The type of transcendence that she feels when soaring on skis or pushing herself beyond physical limits seems to prompt her to explore more spiritual avenues such as Zen Buddhism.

Throughout The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel also connects her quest with historical antecedents, including the seminal Romantic poets William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac (Dharma Bums plays a particularly important role in Bechdel’s life), and later manifestations of countercultural explorations like Buckminster Fuller (how did I not know that he was Margaret Fuller’s grandnephew?), and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog.

In time, it becomes obvious that the subject of this book is much more than just exercise! We follow Bechdel’s creative path through what she calls the “dad book” and the “mom book", her analysis (“Lemme get this straight,” she says to her psychiatrist. “Perfection and worthlessness aren’t the only options?”), her substance use (and abuse), the unavoidable process of aging, and almost incidentally, her love life. This is the first of Bechdel’s books that is colored, to a beautiful effect, and the person who is credited with the “extremely extensive coloring collaboration” is the artist Holly Rae Martin, Alison Bechdel’s wife since 2015.

Throughout the latter part of the book, we begin to see how with the help of Holly, Alison is managing to balance her life and work — in particular, the book we’re reading at the moment. At one point she writes “after yet another trek up to the ravine again rushing with snowmelt, I wrote the last sentence of the book.” But in the next panel she says “I wasn’t finished — I still had all the drawing to do. But I didn’t disappear into it like I had with the Dad Book. Holly wouldn’t let me.” (p. 201)

It had never occurred to me that for a graphic work, the words came first, but on reflection it makes sense, much like a screenplay comes before the storyboarding of a movie. The combination of the words and drawings flow so naturally I suppose I just assumed they had to emerge simultaneously in final form.

It was just after Holly had agreed to help coloring the book that the pandemic hit. Now we were not only ascetic and contemplative, but cloistered. [And here we see Alison looking like a monk with a shaven head.] ... Consumed with this creative project, we were in the flow. Not even the collapse of civilization [and here the TV blares with news of the late Trump years] broke my concentration. (p. 230)

The Secret to Superhuman Strength forms a spectacular trilogy with Fun Home and Are You My Mother? and while it probably won’t be made into an enchanting musical like Fun Home, it’s just as crucial to the portrait and work of this extraordinary writer and artist.