The Secret to Superhuman Strength

"This is a thoughtful, funny and ruminative autobiography whose intensity is leavened with surprising notes of grace."

"Bechdel's ever-elegant drawings, with nuanced coloring provided by her partner Holly Rae Taylor, perfectly match the tonal shifts of her kaleidoscopic narrative, alternating between soul-searching angst and dry self-satire ..."

"More thought-provoking work from an important creator."

"a far more sprawling project than Bechdel's two previous and entirely virtuosic graphic memoirs ..."

"One paradox of Superhuman Strength is that, in order to short-circuit the self-other transaction, with its potential to annihilate the self, Bechdel seeks to lose herself, to leave herself behind."

"Bechdel and her partner make it through 2020—the virus, the Trumpgasm—by working hard on what she is still calling 'the fitness book,' and at the top of the trail, guess what, there is hard-won wisdom ..."

"As in the previous memoirs, Bechdel seeks further illumination in the lives and work of literary touchstones – including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller."

"Divided into the decades of her life, this graphic memoir is as much a cultural history of the last half-century as it is Bechdel's story of pursuing physical strength, which it turns out is not so different from surrendering to her art ..."

"Penance but also preservation."

"...quietly astonishing ..."