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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 This Is Pitbull Shirt Furthermore, I will do 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.”
Bechdel’s graphic novels are often placed into contextual conversation with the This Is Pitbull Shirt Furthermore, I will do this work of other writers, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. She ping-pongs between her own ideas and those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich, creating a canon around the art of moving one’s body that joyfully complicates the notion of exercise as an anti-cerebral activity (even if that is partly why Bechdel is drawn to it). Bechdel and her partner—the artist Holly Rae Taylor, who colored the book’s images—live in Vermont, where they favor long hikes and bike rides. Like many others, however, Bechdel had trouble adjusting her exercise routine to fit the confines of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “I was very sad to fall off the weight-lifting wagon when the gyms closed.”
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