Read: A 2013 interview with ‘Fun Home’ author Alison Bechdel God knew, no one was more self-conscious than I was.” The cat leaves. “I deduced that the soul must therefore consist in this self-consciousness. Bechdel stands up and looks at herself in the bathroom mirror. “But perhaps not conscious of himself as a self, as I was.” The cat stares back at her with his small, humorless cat face. “He was definitely conscious,” runs the text. She is wondering whether her cat has a soul. In one of my favorite sequences in the book, she is in the bathroom, age 9 or so, sitting on the lid-down toilet, clipping her toenails and staring at her cat. The big questions have always preoccupied Bechdel, the memoirist of Fun Home fame.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is an account of Bechdel’s lifelong pursuit of nondual bliss through vigorous-to-the-point-of-violent physical activity: the dharma of working out, you might call it. This is the theme, or one of them, of Alison Bechdel’s rather astonishing new graphic memoir. And all the dichotomies, all the infernal dualities-mind/body, I/you, subject/object, wanting/getting-are finally, finally resolved.īut what if there were something we could do about them while we’re alive? What if through, say, very determined bicycling, or running up mountains, or doing push-ups on our knuckles, we could override ourselves? Forget ourselves, and so transcend these binaries that bedevil us? It swoops it stretches it delights it trails its wing tips in a dazzling, boundless sea. This article was published online on May 3, 2021.ĭ eath comes, and the soul, dragged blinking from its nest of nerves, perceives its dimensions for the first time.

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