The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021
Review by RJ McDaniel
It is with a flurry of activity that Alison Bechdel, acclaimed cartoonist and MacArthur genius, welcomes readers to her new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. We find her, in the book’s opening pages, mid-workout. Wordlessly, with classic comic-book sound effects as accompaniment (Hi-yah! Schxx! Hup!), Bechdel karate-kicks, lifts weights, steps up on a chair, and holds a downward dog, her bright red shirt shining on the page. “Oh hey!” she says, finally, from under her legs. “I didn’t see you there!”
For those who know Bechdel from her previous pair of memoirs—most notably Fun Home, a recounting of her troubled childhood, coming-out, and relationship with her distant, closeted father—this is certainly a departure. Fun Home and Are You My Mother? were heavily referential and dense—hyper-literate, her words often the focal point on the page. Each book used deliberate, limited palettes for emotional effect: cold blues in the former, rich reds in the latter, their restraint highlighting the precision of Bechdel’s text and line work.
Here, as Bechdel moves through frenzied exercise classes, public spaces full of people cycling, running, jumping, paddling, and finally into her own “Gear Shack,” the bright watercolours nearly overwhelm. There are not only the vibrant blues and greens of trees, water, and sky, but the strange neons of gym clothes and wallpaper. Looking at them all is an exercise unto itself.
These pages are busy with motion, colour, people, and most of all, stuff: bikes and boots and dumbbells, skis and advertisements and something called an Abdominator. “Why?” Bechdel asks, surrounded by the detritus of a lifetime spent picking up and putting down every fitness trend imaginable. “Why have I spent so many hours of my life—very possibly as many as are actually recommended—exercising?!”
To answer this question, Bechdel takes a look back on her own life, moving by decade from the moment of her birth to the pandemic present. It is a life she has spent searching not just for endless self-improvement in the form of work and exercise—a perpetual staving-off of death—but, at the same time, for a kind of death of the self: an ending of isolation, a dissolution of the illusory boundaries between the mind and the body, the physical and the spiritual, the individual and the collective.
She gets a taste of this feeling as a child, tossing a tennis ball up and down, up and down, in a meditative, undulating rhythm. “The secret,” she discovers, “…was not to try. Not to think. Not to think about it.” Of course, that’s easier said than done, especially for a precocious, gender-resistant child like Bechdel. She finds herself envying the unawareness of the family cat: “God knows, there was no one more self-conscious than me.”
At the same time, the young Bechdel becomes fixated on the images of self-improvement strongmen she sees on TV. Huge, shiny titans—so divorced from the everyday reality of masculinity that they hardly register as men to her—promise power in the form of programs, regimes, and products. She orders a book from an ad claiming to dispense THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH; when it arrives, the secret turns out to be “a badly reprinted martial arts manual, laughably beyond the comprehension of a child.” Bechdel reproaches herself. Obviously, the secret to superhuman strength isn’t to be found in a mail-order catalogue. But there is a part of her that continues to search for it all the same.
The irony is that she’s already found it: in aimlessly tossing the ball, in the “easy flow” of skiing without thought, in the “blissful absorption” of her childhood drawings. As the decades unfold, Bechdel encounters these moments of perfection, where she is no longer “paralyzed with thoughts of achievement, thoughts of self,” in unexpected places: on a ski hill, gliding effortlessly, the world beneath her; in a crowded city park, high on mushrooms; walking through the silent forest with her partner, mourning the death of a loved one; bushwhacking by a creek with her father and brothers. In these moments, often placed at the end of a decade, outlines and colour fall away. They are rendered in full-page spreads, the lines brushed softly, in shades of grey and white and black. And in a book so often preoccupied with vigor and action, both in narrative and in visual composition, the contrast is breathtaking.
They are, though, just moments: fleeting, isolated, suspended outside of time. Their rarity is essential to their beauty. Back in the confines of chronology, in a world of colour, Bechdel comes out, avoids coping with the death of her father, moves to the city, moves away from the city, finds herself in and out of relationships, quits her job to do comics full-time, writes memoirs whose success shocks her, copes with the death of her mother. The constants in her life are work and exercise, and both provide Bechdel relief and fulfillment, even as they sometimes alienate and injure her.
Throughout the book, Bechdel weaves in the histories of other failed seekers of transcendence, particularly the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller and the Beat troubadour Jack Kerouac. In drawing parallels between them and herself, Bechdel seems to be locating her journey in a tradition of alienated white settlers in America, searching for something greater than themselves in the land. (“Given the extremity of our situation,” she jokes in the introduction, “you might well ask what use another book about fitness by a white lady could possibly be.”) Their journeys are ultimately unsatisfying, with Fuller shipwrecked off Fire Island, her greatest work lost at sea with her, and Kerouac drinking himself to an early grave. Yet the work created by these profoundly flawed figures still haunts and inspires Bechdel—their searching, their repeated failures to find enlightenment and peace.
The most compelling history recounted here, though, is the “anecdotal evidence” of Bechdel’s own striving—her paradoxical simultaneous states of chaos and order, success and misery. In her creative pursuits, Bechdel rides crests of extreme productivity into troughs of depression, loneliness, and substance abuse, often at the cost of her personal life. Her relationships with the many forms of exercise she picks up follow similar, if less devastating, patterns of intensity and burnout. Certain products—a Patagonia jacket, a sweater from the L.L. Bean catalogue, a DVD copy of the INSANITY workout program—seem, at various points, to offer Bechdel what she’s looking for. But none of them are solutions, in the end. “Is this the secret to superhuman strength?” Bechdel asks, again and again; she already knows the answer, and so do we.
In the book’s final moments, Bechdel and her partner, Holly Rae Taylor, stand in the woods, mid-pandemic winter, holding out bird seed for chickadees. They have spent the last several months in their remote Vermont home, completing the book as a collaborative process—the lines and writing done by Bechdel, and the remarkable colours done by Taylor. The greatest departure for Bechdel in this work is not the looseness of the narrative structure, nor the bright visuals, nor the focus on herself as her main subject. It is the freedom she finds in opening herself up to new possibilities of creation without punishment, of work that does not strain endlessly towards an impossible goal. She chooses to live in the contradictions. “This is it,” she writes. “The only thing to transcend is the idea that there is something to transcend.”
Such revelations are easier written than lived—and even in her moment of calm enlightenment, Bechdel can’t help looking for something to strive toward: some near authoritarian future she must prepare for. There’s the contradiction again, one last time; it is only human to run, even as we long to stand still.
RJ McDaniel is a Vietnamese-Canadian writer. An MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia, their plays have been read by the Arts Club and Vancouver Playhouse theatre companies. Their award-winning sportswriting has appeared in VICE, Baseball Prospectus, and Road Grays, among others. Their essays are forthcoming at Catapult, and they are currently working on their debut novel.