The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘The sweat, the endorphins, the togs!’
In this amusing, honest cartoon memoir, the ‘Bechdel Test’ inventor measures out her life in fitness fads
THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH by Alison Bechdel
240pp, Jonathan Cape,
T £14.99 (0844 871 1514),
RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
As someone with an almost pathological aversion to exercise, I approached Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength – the story of her lifelong obsession with working out – with trepidation. I adored Fun Home (2006), the American cartoonist’s exquisite story of her relationship with her father – parttime funeral director and English teacher, full-time closeted gay man and obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian gothic revival home – who died when he was hit by a truck; four months after Bechdel came out to her parents, and two weeks after his wife asked him for a divorce. And, although it didn’t quite reach the ingenious heights of its predecessor, I still found much to admire in Are You My Mother? (2012), in which Bechdel mines her equally fraught relationship with her mother. However passionate Bechdel, now 60, is about fitness, how on earth, I wondered, could a book about that ever live up to the rich intimacy of her earlier material? Turns out, of course, I needn’t have worried.
Bechdel, now famous for the cinematic litmus test she invented in 1985 (“The movie has to have at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man”), was a teenager when she developed a craze for running. “I could not control the hideous metamorphosis of adolescence. But I could control how far I ran, and running promised its own transformation.” After her father’s death, she threw herself into “feminist martial arts” in her 20s. Later came the high-intensity interval training she did “on three continents and more cities than I can count”, while her life became “a kind of highintensity interval training” all of its own: a crazy travel schedule, new projects (this book included), and spending time with her terminally ill mother.
On the one hand, this is the straightforward story of a lifelong addiction, that of someone who readily confesses that they’ve “hared off after almost every new fitness fad to come down the pike for the past six decades”. (Bechdel isn’t afraid of a laugh at her own expense.) Skiing, running, karate, cycling, yoga, weightlifting, in-line skating, hiking; she’s done them all. “I can’t help myself,” she explains, “the sweat, the endorphins, the gear, the togs, the next new thing!” But the bigger question is why she’s spent so many hours of her life – “very possibly as many as are actually recommended” – exercising?
Interrupting what could otherwise have descended into one long training montage are scenes of a different nature; Bechdel’s struggles with her work-life balance, the romantic relationships that didn’t work out, the periods during which she drank too much, or knocked herself out with sleeping pills. Thus, what begins as a story of self-improvement slowly turns into one about the search for selfdiscovery, and the struggle each of us goes through when it comes to facing up to our own mortality. Turning her gaze outward, Bechdel ushers in a whole host of writers and thinkers to play their part – from the Wordsworths (William and his sister, Dorothy) and Coleridge, to Jack Kerouac and Adrienne Rich – spirit guides, one might call them, in her perambulations through humankind’s ongoing search for transcendence.
Bechdel might not reach nirvana, but she does achieve a more believable place of peace, acceptance, and, dare I say it, happiness. Fittingly, The Secret to Superhuman Strength practically glows with a beguiling mixture of intellect, warmth and humour, the suppleness of which is helped by a surprisingly lavish use of colour. There’s a heartbreaking episode in Fun Home where Bechdel remembers how her father’s criticism of one of her childhood drawings meant she “abandoned colour” thereafter. This knowledge, that something more than pigment has been lost, makes the monochrome of the pages seems all the starker from that point onwards. Then came the angry, painful wash of red that anointed Are You My Mother? The leap from that to this new universe of tender pastel tones (coloured by her wife, Holly Rae Taylor) is a revelation all of its own.