The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

Book Review by Rebecca Beardsall

Struggling to sit up as my abs rebel against the H.I.I.T (High-Intensity Interval Training) workout I did two days before, I open up Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

Bechdel takes the reader on her journey. It is a multi-layered journey of body, self, exercise, injury, life, death, budding relationships, and their often long demise. 

Opening with transformation moving towards transcendence, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, an honest, insightful graphic memoir, invites the reader to traverse the steps of Coleridge, Emerson, Fuller, Wordsworth, Kerouac, Rich, and, of course, Bechdel.

Bechdel masterfully hits on the reasons many of us reach towards exercise – as not just a health movement, but a way to escape or a resource to find what is lost. She reminds the reader of those moments when the body allows for the push beyond capacity, and the pure pleasure of the zone, of otherness, that the push creates. Our bodies are beautiful machines, but they are also, as Bechdel reminds the reader, on the downward trajectory the moment we take our first breath. 

Remembering a moment in the park, Bechdel states, “One day, however, I noticed that my ever-present anxiety had vanished. I no longer felt like I was being observed or judged. I just was. And it was bliss” (94). This moment would propel Bechdel to seek this bliss for the rest of her life. 

Kerouac and his books On the Road and The Dharma Bums are scattered throughout the text as a reminder of the quest. At one point, newlywed Bechdel, travels to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains: “I was now fifty-five. Not quite in my dotage, I hoped. But something was ailing me. Kerouac, too, had hoped climbing Matterhorn might transform him” (216). The quest to retrace Kerouac and rediscover self, Bechdel notes, “It was late September, a couple week earlier than the Dharma Bums’ hike. Hol was worried that I was so hell-bent on summitting, I’d do something rash” (217). They didn’t summit the mountain, “We ran out of time half a mile and a thousand vertical feet from the summit. Right about where Jack has frozen in terror . . . This time I was relieved to turn around” (219).

Through the death of her parents, friends, beloved cats, Bechdel keeps moving forward using whatever tools she can: biking, running, skiing, Karate, Yoga, alcohol, oxazepam, acupuncture, therapy. The need to continue. The pressure to be. Push beyond limitations of self and life, “I was amped in those days. Just the idea of ‘relaxing” made me want to jump out of my skin” (173).

The desire to return to the beyond this world towards bliss would come to a head. For Bechdel, the start of the pandemic coincided with a looming book deadline. Adding meditation and walks in the woods to their lockdown life: “Now we were not only ascetic and contemplative but cloistered” (230). At this moment, this time in the world, Bechdel returns the reader to Adrienne Rich, “Rich is not writing about transcending this world. . . but about transforming it. Here, and now” (231). Reminding Bechdel and the reader that “we are not the center of everything. . .be we are a part of everything” (231-2). 

Weaving together the lives of other authors’ quest for transcendence and her own, Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength is a perceptive and clever graphic memoir that reminds all of us to awaken to ourselves, the world, and beyond.

Rebecca Beardsall (MA, Lehigh University; MFA, Western Washington University) is the author of My Place in the Spiral. Find her at: rebeccabeardsall.com