Alison Bechdel’s latest is - in theory - about her lifelong love of exercise. In theory. And it is about that. In part. But it’s mostly this rambly, vague, wishy-washy, truncated autobio with many pointless literary diversions that turns The Secret to Superhuman Strength, at nearly 250 laborious pages, into a test of the strength of the reader’s attention in making the superhuman effort to make it to the end. I hoped this was going to be another Fun Home rather than another Are You My Mother? but, in actuality, it turned out to be the latter unfortunately so I didn’t like this one very much.
The literary diversions include the Romantic poets Sammy Tee Coleridge, Billy and Dotty Wordsworth (as no one called them), the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, and alcoholic hippy and demented type-writist Jack Kerouac. Why? ‘Cos they was artists what liked the outdoors, like Alison Bechdel. So is she comparing herself to them as literary equals or summink?! Yeesh, you give someone a Macarthur Fellowship “Genius” Grant and suddenly they thinks they a genius! Either that anyway or this is all FILLER. Fuller filler.
Bechdel only slightly rehashes material from her two previous memoirs about her pa and ma, before filling us in on her experiences doing skiing, running, swimming, karate, yoga, cycling, and so on. She liked fitness clothes from a young age as well as Jack Lalanne and Charles Atlas. Ok… ? There’s some mild addiction issues and a relationship or two that hit the rocks as Bechdel hit the workahol, but, lordy lordy I was boredy!
When I read the blurb to this one I thought that it was a flimsy concept that was going to be tough to work well and Bechdel proved my initial impression right. Parts of it were occasionally interesting like the look behind the scenes at her creative process and, as irrelevant as I felt they were, the literary factoids on Margaret Fuller were enlightening as I knew nothing about her before this. I related to Bechdel’s experience getting back into running and its effects and the art throughout isn’t bad.
Still, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, unlike real exercise, is a lot of effort for very little in return. Often dull, rarely engaging, and very forgettable, all this book shows is that Bechdel’s out of material and things to say. Exercise = good. Agreed. And… ?
Superhuman shrug.
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