The musical version of Fun Home was a Pulitzer finalist that same year and won five Tony Awards in 2015. She won the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2014. She made famous the “Bechdel test,” a simple query that asks if two female characters in a movie talk to each other about something other than a man. Bechdel chronicled much of gay culture in her 25-year-long syndicated comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For.

The book also reckons with a more ephemeral threat: creative death. So I feel like I’ve always been conscious of the problem of aging and death.” “It was funny to hear myself speaking to myself across the decades. “I said, ‘You better still be running when you’re old and gray,'” she says. Then, after she’s accepted the inevitable, she exercises in an effort to achieve enlightenment.īechdel, 60, recently came across a journal entry she wrote when she was 16. She pitched The Secret to Superhuman Strength as a humorous account of her lifelong obsession with exercise, but the resultant book is hardly a breezy read: the cartoon version of Bechdel turns to physical activity in an attempt to outrun death in her younger years. “After spending a long time writing these intense family memoirs that were kind of grueling, I thought it would be fun to talk about my exercise life, which has always been the one part of my life that wasn’t conflicted,” she says during a Zoom call from her home in Vermont, chosen in part because of its access to biking trails and cross-country skiing.

Alison bechdel books