In her quietly astonishing new book, Alison Bechdel sets out to discover why she has devoted so many hours of her life – “very possibly as many as are actually recommended” – to exercise. On the surface of it, this sounds straightforward. She has been mad about muscles ever since she was a child and first saw Charles Atlas; running used to be the best way she knew of managing stress; as a younger woman, she was as susceptible to fads as she was to sportswear brands. But while The Secret to Superhuman Strength takes a keen interest in karate and spin classes, in Nordic skiing and road cycling, and manages to be slyly funny about all of them, its true subject is self-improvement in the biggest sense of that word. If this sounds off-putting – please, not another book about self-care – all I can tell you is that her thoughts on mortality, wonder and transcendence will do you a lot more good, at this point in the pandemic, than your next yoga class.
How on earth does she do it? The ingenious concision, the warmth of feeling, the fact that the reader never tires of her company (this is her third memoir, after all). In this book, Bechdel, who’s now 60, continues the deep personal excavations of Fun Home and its sequel Are You My Mother?, moving through her life one decade at a time as she looks steadily and bemusedly at her tendency to use, or to try to use, her regimes as a balm (in her 20s, for instance, when she was dealing with the emotional aftermath of her father’s suicide, she had a predilection for “feminist martial arts”). But exercise is like a computer game: how many levels does it have again? With age, even the strongest body weakens; the menopause wreaks its own havoc; a parent dies and suddenly there’s no one standing between you and the grave. Gradually, she comes to realise that there is more to escaping the anxious moment, let alone the abyss, than spending an hour on a rowing machine.
In pursuit of what this “more” might involve, she tours various writers and thinkers – Wordsworth and Coleridge; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller; Jack Kerouac and Adrienne Rich – flipping between their lives and ideas and her own (she takes them seriously, but gently satirises herself). In the space available to me here, I cannot hope to capture all that this extraordinarily generous and roomy book contains, nor the deftness with which she loosely knots her themes together. Suffice to say that while her subjects – nature, love, work, sexuality – are huge, The Secret to Superhuman Strength never feels heavy. If it were a barbell, you’d be able to lift it with one hand.
Her drawings are always extremely precise and extremely nimble. This time around, however, they’ve been coloured by her partner, Holly Rae Taylor, something that not only looks lovely on the page, given all the mountains and forests her narrative involves (the couple live in remote Vermont), but which also enables her to close each chapter with a monochrome sketch: grey shades that are used to suggest, not foreboding or diminution, but peace and acceptance. Transcend the idea that life necessitates transcendence, Bechdel tells us, and the tussocky terrain ahead looks altogether more hospitable.
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel is published by Allen Lane (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
