This graphic memoir from master of the genre Bechdel gets a mixed review from me - I enjoyed her personal story, especially the aspects of it that deal with our aging bodies and the universal fear of death. I was less charmed by the history of exercise portions. Still a great and idiosyncratic voice.

Alison Bechdel is a great storyteller and a masterful illustrator. I will read anything she writes! Yet I had a hard time getting through this book. The narrative is interspersed with stories of famous writers as well as Bechdel's own saga of learning how to be her own person. Although she's self-aware and self-reflective, and some of her statements about growing up queer felt so familiar to me it was like she was reading my own journals from the past, I had a hard time following the thread of the story. However, I know many fans of hers who loved it, so it's probably good to recommend for people interested in memoir, Transcendentalism, writing, lesbian/queer experiences, or middle-class White American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

244 (Netgalley) pages of Bechdel's cycle of addiction and it never once occurs to her that exercise might be part of it. She never once challenges "fitness" as she tries every trend. Meanwhile, she so loosely ties it to the Romantics I couldn't even find the thread most of the time—I guess to make it Art and not 244 (Netgalley) pages of recursive navel-gazing. When your marriage is a footnote, I suppose you think you're on topic, but maybe it's another sign that you focus far, far too much on yourself.

The secret to Alison Bechdel's writing is her sensitivity to tackle mundane themes in the most touching and sensible ways, to make everything feel like a profound meditation on her study subject. As with her other memoirs, this one won't let you down. Her physical journey becomes a journey of the soul, of finding ulterior meaning in the most rudimentary acts of being human: moving your body with the purpose of fulfilling a higher call, to look for immortality in the face of the unavoidable decay of the body. This is one of the most lucid and engaging reads in a while.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is an engaging and accessible stream-of-consciousness philosophical memoir by Alison Bechdel. Released 4th May 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it's 240 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats.

I've been a fan of the author's work for decades and really looked forward to this latest slice-of-life intimate and casual look into her lifelong interest in personal strength, training, and physical fitness as it's impacted (mostly) American life in the last 6 decades (with brief forays into previous centuries). As always, her personal internal reflection and laser focus are interesting and relevant.

The author and I are of an age (she's a couple of years older), but the commercials, programs, and attitudes from media and the lifestyles she highlights are -absolutely- spot on. There's a palpable honesty in her work in general and this one is no exception.

The artwork is spare, subtle, and expressive; much like her work on Fun Home and DTWOF. The points she makes discussing fitness are salient and interesting, but it's the side points, the observations she makes about human nature and life in general which are really illuminating.

This would be a good selection for library acquisition, fans of modern memoir/culture commentary, and I can also see it being an appropriate choice for inclusion as support literature for subjects such as gender studies, American culture, sociology, and similar.

Five stars. She has a lot of relevant things to say and does so in an engaging and honest manner.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Coming off of Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, I just love anything that Bechdel does. Between illustrations and her story telling, her work never disappoints. She uses her talents to convey even the most mundane of things like exercising and turns such things into profound pieces of graphic-novel memoir.

I loved Fun Home by this author, so I snatched up The Secret to Superhuman Strength posthaste without reading the book synopsis. Imagine my disappointment when I realized it was about my arch nemesis, exercise. But it is actually a look at how exercise fads have changed over the years and much more. I’ll just call it a historical memoir and never mention the E-word again!

“We are all careening at speed toward that granite slab.”

Did I mention that the book is also about accepting aging? Yes, it has that too. As with Fun Home, there are multiple layers of plot that would be surprising in a prose novel let alone a graphic memoir. Also, the Romantic poets are frequently mentioned as well as other famous, and long dead, authors.

The fact that this book’s author and I were born within the same year makes the history much more interesting to me than, say, my Millennial daughter. Most of the short vignettes were familiar from remembering my parents crying at the Kennedy assignation to the Aids crisis.

Forget about me. What about you? Will you enjoy this book? I have kind of mixed feelings about The Secret to Superhuman Strength. I think it will appeal to others that have seen their fitness journey evolve over the years. It would also be suitable for readers looking for a completely different memoir about finding spiritual strength in a confusing world. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars!

Thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

This is a fun history of every fitness trend for the last few decades told through the storytelling gifts of a woman who lived through them. I can't even imagine how hard she worked through all this. I loved her journey and the openness with which she tells it. This is another winner for Ms Bechdel.

A HUGE thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for giving me an advanced reader copy of “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” by Alison Bechdel in exchange for an honest review via Net Galley. This book is out May 4th!

I won’t lie, I am a huge Alison Bechdel fan. I was introduced to her work by reading “Fun Home” in a Women Writer’s course I took as a college freshman and have been enamored with the way she writes ever since. “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” is more like her other work, “Are You My Mother?” than “Fun Home” though, which I liked.

In this memoir, we see Alison through a new lens- exercise junkie and work-out-fad-aficionado using moving her body as a means of self care and often a coping mechanism. This concept was appealing to me because I find myself doing the same thing. Like Alison, I go through bursts where I explore different modes of moving my body, whether it be something tried and true like running, or a trendy method like pilates or barre.

The way Bechdel uses this facet of herself to then compare herself to writers like Margaret Fuller and Jack Kerouac deepened the overall theme of the memoir for me. Not only are you getting a new perspective on Bechdel’s life experiences and the facts of life she has learned from them, but you are seeing her attempt to understand herself as she goes through them. As she is a writer, she looks to other writers who use the outdoors to cope with hardships.

Bechdel did what she did in “Are You My Mother?” - she took us on a journey back and forth between her own narrative and the tangents connecting her to writers of the Romantic era, Transcendentalists, and Beatnik authors. I personally enjoyed the push and pull, but it does seem to be an acquired taste. Overall, this was a 4 star read for me, and I look forward to it being put out into the world on May 4th! Preorder yours now!!

I read :Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic a while ago and was astonished by how moved I was by it. It seems like I do repeat my mistakes as I wasn't expecting to be moved by The Secret to Superhuman Strength. How could a graphic memoir about exercise move me?

It did though, multiple times and, actually, when I think about it, it happened throughout the book.

In the beginning, I was a bit confused: I don't read many graphic memoirs - or novels - and I tend to forget how dense they are compared with "slice of life" comic books. They are not quick reads and not meant to be that either.
This memoir begins with an introduction in which Alison Bechdel writes about exercising and how it has permeated life today. Then, she asks herself questions: why did it go this way, how. She'll answer using her personal experiences going from her birth in 1960 to 2020 and she'll answer one particular question that has plagued her for a while: what is the secret to superhuman strength?
The reader gets to see the author as a child, as a teenager, as an adult and her relationship with exercising evolving. It felt honest, authentic; Alison Bechdel doesn't shy away from talking about heavy topics, such as alcohol or drugs. The reader gets to see her working process - frightening, really, I felt ill only reading these parts - and her dealing with the loss of her parents - or any loss, as she writes about losing her cats and breaking-up with girlfriends. She also writes about identity and finding one's place - I particularly loved her discovery of the Women's Music Festival!

It felt strange to me to identify with her on some points, mostly during the childhood part. The author explains that she wanted to grow muscles, to be strong and she "resented" the difference made between boys and girls, be it about clothes or about activities. As a child, I hated being considered less sportive or less able because I was a girl! So it was easy to understand her and to feel close to her reflections about the reason why, growing up, she still wanted to be strong.

I loved that she talks about the different sports that she practised, the different benefits it gave her, but also the fact that exercising was a way, for her, to not feel. She felt her body, her muscles, she was sometimes drained of her energy; she didn't focus on feelings, on what she felt about different events in her life, from her father's death to her wondering where she belonged in the world. It felt like transfer.

I loved that exercising was also a mental quest; I loved to read about her discovery of yoga, a practise I discovered during the first lockdown; I loved that she referenced multiple books and linked her study of her own exercising with the lives of different literary/historical figures such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, but also Dorothy Wordsworth and Margaret Fuller; I loved that I left this book moved, warm, feeling good - I even laughed at the end, with the last sentence.


So, it was a really good surprise; I didn't expect to love this book as much as I did! Both personal and trying to touch the grander scheme of things, it felt true, genuine: the best kind of books!

This book is a look at Bechdel's through the lens of the body. She talks about not just physical activity, but transcendentalism, romanticism, and Buddhism in her journey to to figure out life and living through the years. It's a fascinating and beautiful journey.

3.5 stars

Meditations on pushing physical limits, aging, gender, relationships, & searching for transcendence. I picked this up because I love Alison Bechdel’s other work! I enjoyed this, & the art is great, but it’s more rambling & less focused than her other memoirs.

[What I liked:]

•There are so many great details in the art that enhance the text, like every good graphic novel should have. The full-page spreads of maps, in particular, are wonderful! And I definitely appreciate that the historical fashion was depicted relatively accurately!

•I can definitely identify with a lot of Bechdel’s experiences, especially the creative frustrations, the empowerment & also detriments of physically pushing myself to the limit, insomnia, the frustration of trying to define your identity & feeling like you’re getting nowhere, & the frenzying trap of workaholism. A lot of things about this book resonated with me.

•The narrative is a chronological, decade-by-decade collection of autobiographical anecdotes about Bechdel’s childhood love of nature & physical recreation, and her push to find meaning & transcendence through pushing herself physically & artistically. That base is supplemented with a meta-layer that follows the artistic & philosophical evolutions of Jack Kerouac, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, & William Wordsworth, comparing her own experiences with relationships, creative work, love of nature, & life-long searching for transcendence/joy/enlightenment. It gets very philosophical at times, mainly on the topics of Zen Buddhism & 19th C transcendentalism. I actually really enjoyed learning about Margaret Fuller & Kerouac; I think seeing how Bechdel connected with their stories added depth to her own.

•Bechdel is right about the same age as my parents, so reading the details of her childhood is oddly nostalgic for me in that her memories parallel a lot of what my parents have told me about their own growing up experiences. Her comments & feelings about living through the last decade (looming climate change, volatile US politics, social justice issues, etc.) I was able to connect with personally.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•It took a good 30% of the book in before I really understood what the central themes were, where the narrative was going.

•I get that it’s Bechdel’s real life experience, but the last 30% of the book felt repetitive—frustration with the creative process, trying to find transcendence & getting frustrated when it doesn’t come—the same thoughts & feelings rehashed year after year. Sometimes the pacing dragged.

CW: suicide, terminal illness, substance abuse, physical assault, infidelity

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

Perhaps my expectations for this book were wrong, but I'm afraid I found it very difficult to read. It is very slow, and far too long for what it is. I have enjoyed other work by Bechdel so I am not sure why this one was such a struggle, but unfortunately it was.

Just like many fans of Fun Home, I was excited to read Alison Bechdel's new graphic novel. I was looking forward to a story that exposes a point of view completely new to me. I should preface by saying that I haven't finished the book.

In general, I am a fan of Bechdel's art work. Therefore, I did enjoy that aspect of reading this new novel. But the story, even though, completely foreign to me, required my interest in areas that I wasn't drawn to. Frankly, the general public might also feel hard to get into such topics of history, unless the introduction and presentation of these topics are changed in the novel.

If you enjoyed Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother, you'll love The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Broken down into chapters by each decade of her life, Bechdel takes a philosophical approach to exercise trends, the transcendence of exercise, and her own aging. The hand-drawn, watercolors add a melacholic and thoughtful tone to the book.

I’m a big fan of Fun Home and graphic novels in general so I was really happy to see that Bechdel had a new book coming up. Unfortunately The Secret to Superhuman Strength didn’t live up to my expectations and as I write this I haven’t actually managed to finish it - a rarity for me with a graphic novel.

Spanning the whole of her life, Bechdel explores the various exercise crazes she has attempted throughout her life. It’s a bit of a tenuous theme, but probably relevant in today’s society.

My inability to connect may be more down to me personally than anything else, but it’s full of historical references about literature, poetry and the like that mean very little to me, if anything and these interruptions into the narrative made it really difficult for me to keep track of what was being depicted.

I’m still giving this a star rating as I enjoyed the artwork in as far as I got - and I may end up picking this up in the future, but for now, it’s a disappointing read for me.

I received an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Alison Bechdel examines her life through the perspective of physical fitness as she explores popular fitness crazes through each decade and her own dedication and desire for fitness. Along the way, she explores history, literature, philosophy, Buddhism, sexuality, her own creativity and her struggles with interdependence on others. Bechdel's fans will not be disappointed. Highly recommended.

I have long been a fan of Alison Bechdel and her work, so I was excited to be able to read an advanced copy of #TheSecrettoSuperhumanStrength. One might say that to fully connect with this book, you should read Are You My Mother and Fun Home. The three create a more comprehensive story and fill in the various overlapping pieces of Bechdel's life because Superhuman Strength touches on time periods of the previous two books. That being said, this can absolutely be a stand-alone read. It is so complex in its subject matter: not only Bechdel's life through the lens of the various fitness trends and exercises but also history, literature, religion, politics, relationships, nature, and more--literally dozens of themes are all intertwined in this book. Many thanks to #NetGalley and the publishers for this advanced copy.

MacArthur or not, Alison Bechdel is clearly a genius, and this book only further affirms that. Unfortunately, it's just not very compelling. When it comes to balancing history and mounds of information with emotion and poignant moments, Bechdel did an amazing job at <i>Fun Home</i>, a pretty good one with <i>Are You My Mother?</i> and just a decent one here. Of course, I'm possibly grading this to an impossible standard, but that is at least slightly what I expected. There were some great, resonant moments but overall it felt like a bit of a slog and took me much longer to get through than most graphic works.

"From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times.

Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.

A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times."

Alison Bechdel has done it again!