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The Secret to Superhuman Strength
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78/99
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76/99
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95/99
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About This Book
From the author of Fun Home, a profound graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author's own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others. A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.
Reviews
"rather astonishing ..."
"The real problem of this new memoir is stranger: How does a writer so fond of depicting thought and argument, dreams and recursive therapy sessions depict what lies beyond the mind?"
"More thought-provoking work from an important creator."
"This is a thoughtful, funny and ruminative autobiography whose intensity is leavened with surprising notes of grace."
"Bechdel does finally find some inner calm, conquering symbolic and actual mountains, but the book, which brings us into the present with 2020 election, doesn't end on the expected zen note."
"Bechdel (Are You My Mother?) makes a welcome return with this dense, finely wrought deep dive into her lifelong fixation with exercise as a balm for a variety of needs ..."
"And while this book might not be the author's most gripping work, it is probably her most beautiful, being the first to have been rendered in full colour ..."
"don't mistake it for a self-help book filled with platitudes and exhortations."
"In Bechdel's inimitable storytelling and comics style, as in her much-loved and -lauded Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother?"
"And between chapters she includes airy spreads painted with a flowing brush instead of her trademark boxed-in drawings made with a quivering pen."
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