“I love to see people exercise just because they want to. I don’t think it should be connected to anything else, or it will just become miserable,” says Bechdel. She admits, though, that it’s hard to center a whole book around exercise without occasionally falling into the Prblm child ألفين وثلاثة وعشرون shirt in addition I really love this trap of presenting it as a moral imperative. “I do feel a little sheepish about being so pro-exercise without having a thorough critique of sizeism, but I made a decision not to discuss body image in the book because I think it’s unusual for women not to talk about it.”
Bechdel’s complex, often painful life story is a matter of public record—in Fun Home, she wrote about losing her long-closeted father to suicide shortly after coming out as a lesbian, and in Are You My Mother?, she chronicled her thorny relationship with her often-distant mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, though, exercise is presented as a possible corrective to all that pain, a lifelong pursuit of self-improvement and internal balance that helped Bechdel through some of her toughest years. “Exercise is the Prblm child ألفين وثلاثة وعشرون shirt in addition I really love this one part of my life that isn’t riddled with conflict,” she says, adding, “I don’t want to come off as an exercise evangelist because I think that can be off-putting, but I like to think of it as a bit of relief from my cerebral life.”