There are all manner of reasons The Secret to Superhuman Strength was eight years in the making. For one, Alison Bechdel was dealing with the rather surreal experience of watching her book, Fun Home, be adapted into a successful Broadway musical (soon to be a major motion picture). There was also the matter of turning 60, which the cartoonist did last year — a perfect beat on which to end a book broken down by decades of her life. Perhaps the most time intensive part of the process, however, was funding the right hook. For Fun Home, it was reading list of her father’s favorite books. For the subsequent graphic novel, Are You My Mother?, it was the work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. In her latest, Bechdel explores her own lifelong fascination with fitness. As the first book written after the passing of both of her parents, the author takes center stage in ways she hasn’t necessarily allowed herself in previous works. The subsequent story is both an exploration about identity and meditation on growing old.
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