Alison Bechdel, _The Secret to Superhuman Strength_

 ALISON BECHDEL IS one of those people—Bob Dylan, John Ashbery, Todd Haynes, Johnny Marr come to mind, for me—who seem constitutionally unable to produce anything uninteresting. 

All of the Dykes to Watch Out For collections are worthwhile, by my lights. This is the third of the “book” books, and like its two predecessors it is funny, poignant, insightful, and a visual delight.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is in some ways more ambitious than Fun Home and Are You My Mother? It’s physically larger, in full color, and, though still mainly autobiographical, it contextualizes Bechdel’s story in a wide historical perspective. 

The main current in the book is Bechdel’s conscious efforts, from childhood on, to become stronger. Each of the six decades of her life so far gets a chapter, and in each one she is pursuing one or more activity with the intention of becoming stronger and fitter: skiing, martial arts, bicycling, and running, for example. With each activity, she also gives us a sense of the culture around it, how at one time or another it was having its moment, with its particular buzz and patois, its particular equipment fetishisms. Even though this is mainly her story, we get a sense of how broad a movement physical fitness has become in the USA.

But bodies come attached to minds, perhaps to spirits, and Bechdel’s pursuit of bodily fitness intersects often with her pursuit of mental and spiritual fitness. Accordingly, we learn also of her involvement with yoga, meditation, Buddhism, and the Anglo-American culture of seeking, particularly as represented by the English Romantics (focusing on Coleridge and the Wordsworths) and the American Transcendentalists (focusing on Emerson and Fuller). 

Bechdel achieves the near impossible by taking herself seriously without…taking herself seriously. That is, she makes no apologies for devoting herself to physical and spiritual self-development. Her pursuits can seem like solipsistic self-absorption—do indeed seem so to some of her friends and partners, it looks like—but the reader never doubts that they are for her not just worthwhile, but indispensable, the activity that enables her to live a meaningful life. Yet she is so funny about it all—so self-deprecating, so clear-eyed about its absurdities, that the book never has the irritating smugness so many, many tales of self-improvement have. 

And her drawing—is it better than ever? I’m ready to say yes. The same painstaking detail, but also occasional pages in a loose gray wash…a greater tonal variety than ever. As I was saying, is any Bechdel going to be one you should skip? Nope.