Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2021 July 02 • Friday

Alison Bechdel's new book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, perhaps completes a trilogy.

Fun Home focused on her father, Are You My Mother? was about, believe it or not, her mother and now, with The Secret to Superhuman Strength, she has presented us with a story about herself.

Of course all three books are also about her and about her mother and about her father and about other people in her life.

The distinction is one of, I don't know, perspective or approach or centering or something like that.

Fun Home had a narrative arc and some big events that presumably helped audiences to get swept away by it. Indeed, it became a successful Broadway musical, which is an extraordinary event for an autobiographical comic.

Are You My Mother? was a deeply psychological and psychoanalytic work, successfully presenting intensely interior mental and emotional events through Bechdel's virtuosic talent and skill. While I remember finding the story to be not everything I had hoped it would be, I thought the book was a powerful example of the potential of the medium and Bechdel's use of the medium to be genius.

With The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel is straightforward about her purpose, which is definitely a challenging one.

Who knew that fitness had been a constant in her life? And that she would follow this thread through a labyrinth of personal relationships, physical ordeals and study of figures as diverse as Jack Kerouac, Margaret Fuller and Samuel Coleridge, among others (such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, or "Waldo" as she usually calls him).

There's also Buddhism, meditation, martial arts, therapy, booze and pills.

The book is divided into decades, both hers (every ten years of her life) and ours (the 1970s, the 1980s, etc.)

There's often a television or newspaper or magazine cover in the background as a kind of signpost for where we are in the world of current events, and it's frequently helpful and often significant, such as when she sees how negative projection can go viral, so to speak, as it so lamentably has done recently.

And it's not just about her life but about the lives of others who came before and some who were there with her. It is, once again, an example of brilliance in the medium itself, though a sparer, quieter work.

Like all of her books, it is absolutely excellent reading for anyone struggling with themselves. Isn't that everyone?