Alison Bechdel: The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Image source: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Alison Bechdel's The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) is the third installment in her series of graphic memoirs. Her books do not follow one another chronologically, but rather re-examine and rework from different perspectives her experiences from childhood to later life.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) focusses on her father, and the impact of his emotional reticence, hypercritical perfectionism, secret gay life, and mysterious death on Bechdel and the other members of her family. Bruce Bechdel was both the town undertaker and high school English teacher. As well as an acute self-consciousness and an overactive inner critic, he also bequeathed to his daughter an enduring love of literature. Fun Home is filled with allusions to the books that inspired Alison's imagination and helped shape her sense of self as she grew up, moved away, came out, and discovered her calling as a writer and artist through her multi-character comic strip serial Dykes To Watch Out For.

Bechdel's second memoir, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) spotlights the dynamics of her emotionally fraught relationship with her mother. A New York-trained actress, Helen Bechdel focussed her creative energies on appearances in community theater productions of The Heiress and The Importance of Being Earnest. The stage may have been an outlet for emotions too messy or too dangerous to express openly at home; enacting dramas onstage may have been a way of avoiding, or displacing, the emotional demands and conflicts of her marriage and family life. Are You My Mother? invokes the writings of psychologists Alice Miller and D.W. Winnicott in an attempt to understand how Helen's emotional unavailability left Alison to seek approval by taking on the role of the responsible child, a role that as an adult she finds she has internalized. When Are You My Mother? ends, Helen is calling Alison every day for conversation—or, rather, as the actress she remains, to deliver self-involved, self-dramatizing stream-of-consciousness monologues.

From the program for Fun Home, the musical by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, based on the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel. Click the image to enlarge.

Towards the end of The Secret to Superhuman Strength we learn that quite a lot has happened in decade since Are You My Mother?: Bechdel was awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, Fun Home was adapted into a highly successful Broadway musical, and her mother died. Another writer might have centered a memoir around any or all of these events. While the new book touches on each of them, it is instead primarily about Bechdel's lifelong quest to quiet her critical inner voices through physical activity.

Indeed, rather than the secret to superhuman strength (the title of a pamphlet the young Alison sent away for after seeing an advertisement in the back of a comic book), Bechdel's real goal seems to have been to enter the state of receptive mental emptiness that taxing physical effort can induce. This state is similar to that of "flow," first named by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in which absorption in a task leads to seemingly boundless creative energy without the need for conscious intervention.

From The Secret to Superhuman Strength; click the image to enlarge. Image source: CBC Radio

Bechdel also touches on other paths she's taken to try to achieve that goal. These include martial arts—a donning of a kind of bodily armor, self-protection as a means of psychic protection; Buddhism (Shenryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums are featured); immersion in nature (Bechdel is overstimulated by urban noise and crowds); and the classic (and ineffectual) shortcut, alcohol, which both stimulates and dulls the mind. But she always returns to working out, biking, hiking, and running, which seems to be the activity that most directly enables her to achieve the state of mindless/mindful emptiness she seeks.

The literary touchstones in this installment are the Romantics Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the Trancendentalists Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and the Beats Gary Snyder and, especially and surprisingly, Jack Kerouac. The Beats' casual misogyny was of its time, but Kerouac's connections to nature, Buddhism, and alcohol resonate with Bechdel despite his limitations as a writer and a person.

One surprise for longtime Bechdel fans will be that The Secret to Superhuman Strength is in full color instead of the monochrome blues of Fun Home or reds of Are You My Mother? The rich new palette is thanks to Bechdel's spouse, the painter Holly Rae Taylor, to whom the book is dedicated, and who is thanked on the title page for her "extremely extensive coloring collaboration" and in the acknowledgments for all "she did to keep our lives afloat"; she also appears in the book as herself. Surely there is no greater love than to allow yourself to be written about by your life partner.

There are a number of themes touched on in The Secret to Superhuman Strength that will resonate with readers of a certain age (that is, Bechdel's age). The wonders of television (Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans, Romper Room, Jack LaLanne, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the moon landing), political and social changes, and, of course, the developments in outdoor, workout and sports gear over the decades. Inevitably, in covering so much ground some elements get less full treatment than others, and in particular some of the later sections of the book seem to pass over highly significant social and personal milestones rather quickly.

But as a beautifully produced and densely allusive survey of Bechdel's life from childhood until now, the book amply succeeds. If you're a Bechdel fan, you shouldn't hesitate to run out to your local independent bookshop and buy it. If you're not yet a Bechdel fan, I recommend that you start with Fun Home; you'll soon want to read everything she's done.