© Houghton Mifflin HarcourtIn her new book,"The Secret to Superhuman Strength," the author and graphic memoirist traces her personal relationship and journey with her body and exercise.
Alison Bechdel is one of the most famous graphic memoirists in the country, and for good reason. She is the author and illustrator of Dykes to Watch Out For, Are You My Mother, and Fun Home, all pillars of the American cultural canon and the latter of which became a groundbreaking, Tony-winning musical. She is also the catalyst behind the now-famous Bechdel test, a set of criteria that, after appearing in a Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip in 1985, evaluates any piece of film and other fiction against three simple requirements : one, it has to have at least two women in it; two, they must talk to each other; and three, they must talk about something besides a man.
Bechdel was awarded a MacArthur"Genius Grant" in 2014, and her work is known for its unique style of combining incisive insight, humor, emotional resonance, queer ethos, and visually stunning illustration. She brings all of that to her new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, in which Bechdel traces her personal relationship and journey with her body and exercise. In the process, she delves into the cultural and spiritual histories of aging, building (and questioning the language around) the mind-body connection, and the emotional reality of living through our bodies.
Shondaland spoke with Bechdel about bodily movement, aging and death, gender, and Charles Atlas' muscles.
SARAH NEILSON: What was the process of putting this book together? When did you start working on it, and how did it evolve over time?
ALISON BECHDEL: I've been working on this book for forever. I have a very slow creative process. I began working on The Secret to Superhuman Strength a year after I finished my last book, Are You My Mother?, which came out in 2012. All of my books have a similar circuitous process. I don't really know what I'm doing when I start, and so it takes me a long time to figure it out. I've never been one of those people who could make an outline and then flesh it out and be done. I don't know what I want to write about until I've almost finished it, often. I feel like I'm able to let my projects just expand and bloom at their own pace. I've been lucky to be able to do that and not have to bang stuff out really fast. This book ended up having this whole component that I hadn't quite envisioned at the outset, of bringing in work by other writers, by the transcendentalists, Jack Kerouac, and the British romantics. Honestly, I was reading not so much the work of those people as biographies about them, and just losing myself in other people's lives in a really delightful way. It was a lot of reading, assimilating, and then trying to relate their lives to each other and relate my life to them. It was just a long, organic process.
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SN: Was there anything that surprised you while you were researching, either about what you were reading or about yourself, and how you did end up relating your life to these other writers?
AB: The surprising thing to me is that I do this strange thing at all. Like, why am I compelled to write about my life in this way? Sometimes it feels pretty neurotic. I'm very compelled, almost obsessively, to keep track of my own life. I've always kept a diary. So, a lot of my process for this book was trying to tell the whole story of my life, of the six decades of my life so far, in a book that's not 10,000 pages long. Like, how do I condense all of that material into a single narrative that will hold people's interest? That was a very consuming project.
SN: How do exercise and movement figure into your ideas of your body and ideas of queerness and gender?
AB: It is interesting to me that as a small girl I was adulating Charles Atlas and somehow I thought I was going to grow up to look like him. But I don't really explore that deeply. I do think that's not that unusual; lots of kids just were obsessed with those ads because of the promise of power that they offer. I don't know; maybe it's more queer than I am going into. I really have not explored some of this stuff because I don't really know what I think or feel. But I just let that sit there, that dissonance between being a girl and admiring Charles Atlas. I do go on in my life to eventually do stuff that will build up my strength, to do a lot of stuff that I'm sure was in the Charles Atlas manual that I never actually read. And that felt important to me in part because of this slight gender blurriness. For a long time, I would often be the only woman in the weight area of the gym. There'd be all these guys and me. And I felt like I really understood them, that we were doing the same thing. They wanted to be bigger and stronger just like I did. I felt like I could really understand their motivation.
Typically, women don't want to get bigger; they want to get smaller. But I have always liked having muscles. I never was a bodybuilder. I never did the weightlifting that would really give me Charles Atlas muscles, but I really did like the feeling of being strong. And there was a feminist element to it too in my youth. Culturally, I grew up learning that girls could not do push-ups; women could not do push-ups or run or throw. That was so annoying to me as a child, and so growing up and learning to fight felt important.
SN: Can you talk a little bit about your thinking around the way media saturation influenced perception of bodies for you over time?
AB: It was about the time I came into the world - I was born in 1960 - that as a culture we started really grappling more with people's bodies. It was the middle of the civil rights movement; feminism was just getting underway. We were learning about the threat of nuclear annihilation and pesticide use. We were really thinking about our physical bodies in a way that Western culture had not done. Bodies were embarrassing appendages that we didn't really admit to having until quite recently. I wasn't thinking so much about media images, but certainly the way bodies are represented has also been a huge thing. And not in that positive way, you know? Sometimes I feel like one of the downsides of feminism is that it has not so much given women more space to have bodies and feel good about their bodies, but it has dragged men into the pit of worrying that their bodies aren't good enough either. But I hope we're all going to get done with all of that stuff.
© Houghton Mifflin HarcourtA page from Alison Bechdel's A Secret to Superhuman Strength.
SN: There's a scene in the book in which your mom is in palliative care. You write that in staying with her you were doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing, which is to say not doing but being. Can you talk about the physical experience of doing and being, which I think can be two different experiences or they can heavily overlap? How does physicality factor into grief for you, and how did you approach bringing that aspect into the book?
AB: My big issue in life has always been my tendency to get caught up in my head, to get lost in my thinking. I feel like my love of exercise has saved me to a certain extent from that. It has given me that embodiedness. It's grounding... a tether.
But, still, I grew up in a family where we didn't talk about feelings. It was a very repressed and cerebral household. It was very interesting to experience my mother's death because my mother was just like me. She too was a very cerebral person but also someone who loved to exercise. I think it was hard for her to die; I think she didn't want to die. It took a while, but then she finally did let go. And that period of her being in that process of coming to terms with letting go of her own body and life was really magical. It was a great gift to be able to be part of that. I did feel my life took on its proper proportions in that moment, like this was the important thing to be doing. Nothing else mattered. It was funny because it was not long after my book about my mother came out, and I had several public events scheduled to go talk about the book about my mother, which I had to cancel because my actual flesh-and-blood mother was dying. So, it just put everything in perspective.
SN: I'm curious about this dynamic that you arrived at pretty early in the book and kept exploring throughout, of individualism versus the collective and interdependence. Can you talk about that dynamic? Was it something you were actively thinking about as you started writing the book, or was it something that came to you as you were making it?
AB: I did have a notion of that at the outset. I knew that the real appeal of those Charles Atlas ads when I was little was this idea of self-sufficiency that they promised, which I think is a very compelling idea for Americans in general. We all want to be like the lone cowboy on the prairie, the rugged individualist who doesn't need anyone. I'm a lesbian, a feminist, a progressive, and I still on some level have those red-state, old-white-man feelings. So I wanted to make a project that's facing those and trying to work through them. I love the idea of humanity, but I have trouble with people in particular. Other people are just difficult. Whether it's your intimate partner or people you have political differences with, that's where most of our trouble in life comes from. Also most of our joy, of course. I tended toward just isolating myself, and I've been trying to more deliberately connect and open up and be part of a group.
SN: How have you seen your work change over time, and how has it felt releasing this new book?
AB: I feel like I have been on a quest to get back to the state I was in as a small child in terms of my work. Most people draw as children, but I actually grew up and became someone who drew as my job. But, of course, part of that experience meant losing that art flow and ease of my childhood creativity. So I feel like I've been struggling for decades to get back there. I've learned so much - how to draw, how to become a better writer. I've gained all this knowledge, and I've become more ambitious for myself. It's very hard to do all that and feel creative ease and flow. There's some point you have to get to where you can take all those skills and somehow then also forget them. And I feel like I did achieve that in this book. By the time I was actually doing the drawing work, which is the final stage of it for me, I really did feel like I had recaptured some of that childhood flow.
Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer. They can be found on Twitter @sarahmariewrote.
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