Alison Bechdel Reboots with Nighttime Badminton and Drawing in the Woods

“Oh, to be self-sufficient! Hard as a rock! An island!” The speech balloon floating above Alison Bechdel’s head arrives early in her latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, as she recalls a childhood wish to “be as jacked as Charles Atlas”—the chiseled bodybuilder whose mail-order course piqued even Gandhi’s interest. That line manages to prefigure the rest of the book. Part odyssey through fitness fads, part coming of age from the “textbook weakling” years into menopause, Superhuman Strength also folds in historical figures that align with Bechdel’s life: the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, the dharma-curious, drink-addled Jack Kerouac. 

But really, the idea of a self-sufficient island calls to mind the recent past. “Honestly, the pandemic did not have a huge impact on my life. I just kept doing what I always do,” Bechdel explains from Vermont, where she lives with her partner, Holly Rae Taylor, in the foothills of the Green Mountains. (Taylor, an artist, did the coloring for the book. During breaks, they carved a path through the hardwood forest and trained chickadees to eat from their hands.) “All I was doing was sitting at home, working,” the author recalls. “I was able to keep up a pretty good exercise practice.” 

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

By Alison Bechdel

Bechdel seems to operate like a self-winding watch, keeping time (and existentially extending it) through everyday motion. Superhuman Strength chronicles her early ski lessons and intense judo training; she later settles into a rhythm with running and biking, yoga and meditation, all of which still accompany her at 60. “I decided I’d walk in the woods while I talk to you,” Bechdel says partway into our conversation, as overlapping melodies of birdsong trickle through the phone. “Sorry if they’re a little loud today.” 

As a result, this three-day wellness diary—with technical difficulties and to-do list fails—is something of a coda to her memoir, where death and heartache and politics intercede. On the last page, Bechdel says to Taylor, “I gotta stay in shape. Just in case things go further south and I have to run messages for the resistance. Nobody will suspect a little old lady.” 

There’s an inner buoyancy, even against the looming sense of futility. “I was part of the generation that really thought we would have a future, and [I’m] now adjusting to that not necessarily being the case,” Bechdel says. “It’s anxiety-provoking, but I can also toggle back into my pre-aware state—denial, I guess.” After all, time is short, and Bechdel has to run. “We’re heading to the beach later today, so I’m just madly trying to get everything thrown in the car.”

Wednesday, June 23

6:30 a.m.: I am a wreck. My back has been out for days, I’m battling cold sores, and last night we went to a restaurant with some friends for the first time since the pandemic hit, and to celebrate, I had two beers when one would have sufficed. My resting heart rate is 57, about 5 points higher than it was a year ago, during quarantine, when life was simpler and I was running a lot.

7:10 a.m.: Hol and I meditate for twenty minutes. This was a regular quarantine thing too, but lately, not so much. We’ve both fallen off the Wellness Wagon since things opened up and life has gotten busy again. So we’ve designated this week “boot camp.” That means every day we will either meditate or do yoga, get some kind of aerobic exercise, and do a weight workout.

I recently realized that the reason I fail to do my yoga routine regularly is because it takes half an hour. Who has that kind of time? So my new strategy is to lower my standards. Five minutes is better than no minutes. By this same logic, I’m counting a two-mile walk as cardio, and a set of push-ups as a weight workout. It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps another term for my standard-lowering is “getting older.”