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Bechdel isn’t the Our lagos shirt moreover I will buy this type of artist to believe her own hype, even when said hype is well warranted. When I ask how it feels to have created work that so many queer people identify with, she’s hesitant: “I went through a period of feeling very anxious about that, because many young people would tell me that my comic-strip characters were the first lesbians they’d met. I was like, Oh, my God, what am I telling these people? I should be more careful. I don’t feel that concern as much anymore, partly because there are hundreds and thousands of people writing about queer stuff. It’s just a much wider field these days.”
Perhaps it’s the Our lagos shirt moreover I will buy this widening of that field that freed Bechdel up to write The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Some might read the memoir’s description and expect an account from a woman beholden to Pilates or Flywheel or any other trendy boutique fitness class where an hour in a sweaty room costs roughly the same as a nice meal out. But for Bechdel, exercise isn’t really about aesthetics; it’s about strength, a virtue she’s been in thrall to ever since she first saw bodybuilder Charles Atlas on TV as a child. At 60, Bechdel appears wholly uninterested in perpetuating the workout-as-self-care trope; she makes it clear that her relationship with exercise is something much deeper and more fraught.