Alison Bechdel, THE SECRET TO SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH

[1:36]Zibby Owens: But at that time, I was like going to the guy at Joe and the Juice behind the counter asking him to vote for me and anyone I could. So now I'm coming to all of you to ask you to please vote for moms don't have time to read books to win the People's Choice Webby Award for Best Live Podcast. If you go to vote.webbyawards.com, again, that's vote.webby, W E B B Y, webbyawards.com, and then go to the little magnifying glass search thing on the upper right. All you have to type in is search by name or entry and just type in moms and it will come up. And then you can click on the best live podcast recording nominee and vote for me. Also, by the way, I won honoree for best influencer, which is crazy. Anyway, thank you for voting. I really, really would appreciate it. I would love to win the People's Voice Award, especially after trying so hard and failing two years ago. So if you could just take a few minutes and vote, I would be so grateful. You could email me after if you want at infosibbyowens dot com. And I will say thank you to you via email myself because I'm so grateful. So email me if you've done it, post about it. I'm just I would be so grateful. Thank you. Hi, this is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Alison Bechdel is the author of The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Her cult following for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her bestselling memoirs Fun Home adapted into a Tony award winning musical and Are You My Mother? Her many honors include being named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont. Welcome, Alison. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thank you, Zippy. I'm very excited to be here. So your book has both a weight loss ish piece and, of course, a read books piece. So either way, delighted to have you in my podcast universe to talk about your fantastic new graphic novel. Thank you. Yeah. I just wrote this book called The Secret

[4:12]Alison Bechdel: to Superhuman Strength, which is sort of a memoir about my own life as an exercise enthusiast, as someone who has pursued fitness in many different ways over the course of my life. I wouldn't say it's a, there's not a weight loss component to it though. I'm very careful in this book not to, I exercise for many reasons, but the desire to lose weight is not one of them. I just sort of, you know, I find that whole idea a little problematic. What I would love is to unlink exercise from the idea of losing weight, because I want exercise to be pleasurable and a positive fun experience for people. And if you go into it with this sort of punitive idea that you're doing it in order to lose weight, I think it just, it's gonna take all the joy out of it for one thing. And also, you know, I'm not an exercise physiologist by any means, but I don't think exercise is really a great way, at least on its own to lose weight. You know, when you exercise, you get hungrier, you eat more, your body becomes more muscular and therefore heavier. Like I would just like to disconnect weight loss from exercise.

[5:22]Zibby Owens: I'll disconnect with you. I believe that too. To be honest, today, I've like been on a workout kick for the first time since really COVID started. I've done like eight days in a row and it's completely changed my mental sanity and outlook. But not the scale has not, you know, I finally was like, this is ridiculous. But that's not why I do it. I'm like, I would have eaten all this junk anyway. Now I'm just working out in addition. So it's a totally different thing and so key to mental health. But your book was much more both a cultural commentary and a personal journey in pictures, essentially. You go from, you know, watching Jack Lalanne on TV and getting your first TV back in the, like, you know, John F. K. Assassination date all the way through, you know, newer ish, you know, like, you propelling what is the word? Rappelling up on a rock climbing wall and all sorts of different ways that you've sort of found your way through the world in your body, which I found super interesting, including your horrific grief and loss along the way and everything else. So tell me a little bit about how you decided to do this book, especially on the heels of such accomplished amazing books before it. Well, yeah, I wrote these memoirs about my family,

[6:42]Alison Bechdel: about these kind of heavy, deep family stories that I was sort of trying to exercise from myself with exercise as an o, not not an e. And I wanted to do something that was lighter and more fun. So I thought, you know, I've always loved fitness, exercise, riding my bike, running, skiing. Why don't I write a book about that? Because, you know, exercise is a fun topic. So I started work on this book and it actually turned out to be almost as grueling as these intimate family memoirs were just because I was really looking at, I don't know, my whole life. This is a memoir about the course of my life. I just turned 60. Like at the time I was finishing the book, turned 60. So the book is divided into six chapters, one for each decade of my life. And I was born in 1960, which is pretty much, I think, when as a culture we started exercising. People didn't really go to gyms before that or think about their cardiovascular fitness. That's all pretty modern. So I was interested in the way my own life overlaid that cultural history. And I I was doing all the things when everyone else was doing them. I started downhill skiing as a little kid. My parents took me and my brother's alpine skiing. As a teenager in the seventies, I took up jogging. When everyone was starting to run, it was just like this thing in the air. In the eighties, I did martial arts. I joined a women's martial arts school. Later, I did yoga. I moved to Vermont in the nineties to the country after living in the city for ten years and started doing all these outdoor things that everyone here does. They ride their bikes and climb mountains and run up mountains. So I took up all those sports. My house is filled with all kinds of gear and crap. And I wanted to write about what it is that I get from all of these things. What is it that I get from all of these things? It's, you know, it's I want to say it's more of a metaphysical thing than a physical thing. But I also get a very physical benefit from all this physical activity because it grounds me in my body. I'm someone who's very cerebral, very like just caught up in my thinking mind all the time. So exercise has been a huge counterbalance to that. Just really bringing me back to earth quite literally. But there's something about, there's this really wonderful feeling that I can get sometimes when I'm working out, which is that feeling when you're no longer like trapped inside of your individual body, but you just start to merge out with the rest of the world. You're not thinking about yourself. Sometimes like on a very long run, it'll be like, I'm not, I don't exist as a self anymore. I am just the act of running. And there's something so blissful about that, about that getting out of my, you know, my own limited small self to this bigger connected experience. And that's kind of what motivates me to keep doing all this stuff. The promise of getting that feeling again. Wow. And you included

[10:02]Zibby Owens: a lot of this sort of soul introspection in the book also as you sort of overlaid it with the working out. And you referenced how you had grown up with your family's funeral home business and how death was never too far away from the beginning. And it was funny because as I researched you, I was sort of saying out loud to my husband who was sitting next to us. I was like, wow. You know, her her dad was an army veteran and her dad this. And I was like, oh my gosh. And then her dad died. And oh my gosh. This is how he died. And I kept like and they worked at a funeral home. And oh my gosh. And so I I was like, I can't believe it. And then as I was reading your book after and like pausing on the dark pages, which I, you know, I love how you just took all the color out of the time where you explain what happened to your dad, which I wonder if you would be willing to talk about, but how your sort of sense of life's fleetingness has been there forever. So tell me a little more

[10:56]Alison Bechdel: that. Yeah. My dad was a funeral director and I grew up completely like taking death for granted. It was just something that we saw all the time. We didn't live in the funeral home, but my grandmother did. She just lived right up the street. And my brothers and I would we had chores at the funeral home. We would set the chairs out or help my dad arrange the flowers. And we'd, you know, we would see very routinely these dead bodies, mostly very old, tiny, shriveled people who'd had long, full lives, but occasionally like younger people. And it was really, I feel like it was a gift, you know, to have this exposure to death. I know that many of my friends had never seen a dead body and they just thought it was so wild that I saw this all the time and they'd always ask like, what's it like? Is it scary to be in the house? And I would say, no, it's really not. It's just kinda like kinda cool. I felt special because I had this access to death that most people didn't have. And I feel like it kind of established in me a certain preoccupation with my own mortality. I knew that this was gonna happen to me too. But of course, as children, we can't really see that far into the future. It's very abstract. You might know you're gonna die, but you don't really believe it. It's something that I think as we go along through life, it becomes more visible to us with time. I still don't really believe it. I'm always trying to really work on my acceptance of my own mortality. But there's something in us, I think, that just makes it really that we resist it on so many levels. So one of the things I was looking at in this book is, you know, the fact that I am aging, my body is starting to lose strength, lose flexibility, all the things that I worked out to, you know, increase. That's all going away even as I continue to work out. Quite sobering.

[12:57]Zibby Owens: You have that picture of I'm sort of drawing with my finger for but like, of the going up the cliff and then like, you have this downward slope then with which ended just with a little tombstone. Like, this is so depressing. It's like, I why get out of bed in the morning? I know. That's that's exactly.

[13:17]Alison Bechdel: Yeah. That's I I drew a little image of myself biking up a mountain and it's overlaid with my different times. Like twenty years ago, my favorite bike ride, I was doing it at like 16 miles an hour. And now it's like 12 miles an hour. Just this, I still feel like I'm working as hard as I can, but I'm becoming an old person. So how do we live with that knowledge?

[13:40]Zibby Owens: I don't know. I didn't really arrive at an answer to that. But I think it's a very important question. Right? I mean, my dad's joke is always, well, it's better than the alternative. You know, whenever we talk about aging, right? It's like, well, got this, this, and the other thing, but, you know, could be worse.

[13:55]Alison Bechdel: Yeah. I mean, for me, in my case, it's not really like death so much that I'm afraid of. It's getting weak. It's getting dependent on other people. It's not being able to care for myself. The title of my book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength comes from an ad in a comic book for a little booklet that I sent away for when I was a kid. I always loved those, the Charles Atlas ads that were in the back of every like child's comic book. You know, the big bully on the beach who kicks sand on the little weak guy. And so the little weak guy goes and builds himself up until the next time the guy kicks sand on him, he can clock that guy. And I found that an extremely compelling narrative as a child, because yeah, wanted to be strong. I wanted to be in control of my life. I didn't want I mean, I think the reason those ads are in comic books, even though tiny children are not gonna become bodybuilders, it appeals to that that sense children have of just being so small and powerless. And I certainly felt small and powerless as a child, and I wanted to be big and strong. I wanted to be in charge. And over the course of my life, that idea of strength remained very compelling, but it became more an idea, a fantasy about just about self sufficiency, more than just brute physical strength. I wanted to be, I didn't wanna need other people. I wanted to be my own everything. So that's another thing I explore in this book is the fact that I'm not self sufficient. None of us are. We're all gonna get weak. And at various points in our life, we're gonna need help. And I'm just trying to work on my acceptance of that. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

[17:45]Zibby Owens: I mean, it's possible we won't. I mean, this is one of those things. Like, I feel like if you were my daughter and she was worrying about this, I would say, well, you know, you don't know that for sure. You don't know that it's definitely gonna go that way. Who knows what tomorrow's gonna bring? But like, maybe, you know, I would probably say to her like, you know, enjoy the strength you have today because what you know, tomorrow could be the last day and you will die as strong as you ever were. You know what mean? I don't know. I I think there's a balance of not to say you shouldn't be thinking about this, and I I No. I like this. Think. This is great. But I feel like that's what I would probably say to her is to like, you know, you don't know. Like my mother is 73 or something and she runs five miles a day and, you know, has like this amazing golf handicap and she's far better shape than I am. Like, I wouldn't say she was weak. So I mean not to say that by the time she's 95 she won't be but I don't know. It's nothing is a sure thing. Not even sort of the decline. It maybe it won't be as precipitous.

[18:43]Alison Bechdel: Oh yeah. I think that's true. And that's certainly part of my fantasy as I, you know, lift weights and run, you know, go on my runs. But I also am increasingly aware of how fragile we are, you know? Like I fall all the time. Not that I'm unusually clumsy, but I'm just realizing, you know, I often fall when I'm running. Not often, but, you know, I will occasionally hit the deck or doing any number of activities. But when you fall and you're old and your bones are brittle, that's really a problem. So I've just been thinking about that. Like it's not so much that we can't do stuff, but that we can't recover the way that we can when we're younger and more supple.

[19:27]Zibby Owens: I'm sorry to be such a downer. Let's not let's not think about brittle bones. No. It no. No. No. It's I mean, this is part of life. I mean, for people I mean, I I share this sort of top of my like, death is top of mind for me on a daily basis. Like, I'm not one of these people who doesn't think about it. Like, I'm I feel like anybody who's had loss in their life, it's not like an abstract. Right? It's very much Yeah. Especially now when, you know, so many yeah. So well, tell me a little bit about how you decide like how did you cause there are like a zillion illustrations that accompanied this book. So how did you go about the text versus the illustration and the whole process of it? Like how long did it take? Tell me how it goes how was it creating this?

[20:13]Alison Bechdel: Well, I'm a cartoonist. That's how I tell stories is with words and pictures together. Although if you watched me working, if you watched my process, I do kind of write first. I need to have an idea of where I'm going with a book or a story before I can start doing the drawings because drawing is a lot of work. Some I mean, I think many cartoonists probably draw and write more simultaneously than I do, but I'm sort of a wordy cartoonist. So I like to have my my text set. So for a long time, I was just looking at my own life. I'm a memoirist. You know, I'm writing about myself. That's really what I do. And I keep a lot of records of my life. I have all kinds of journals and date books and photo albums. And I was just trying to get a handle on the arc of my own life and when certain transformational moments for me happened in my life. And you mentioned in the book, some of the cartoons are in color, but some pages in the book are in black and white. And there are certain moments when I felt like some real change was happening in my life. And those I did in black and white, took the color out and also the line. They're not just black and white, but they're done with a brush, like a Asian Sumie style of drawing instead of ink lines like the rest of the book. And for me, moments are times when I feel like I could see through life, through the busy everyday life that we live into this more mystical aspect of existence where everything is kind of, it's just not as clear cut. Things do blend into one another. Things are connected. There's no sharp delineation the way we see a table or a computer screen and another person on it in our everyday life. It's really all just, you know, a lot of space and quantum particles, and it's all one kind of material on a certain level. Sorry to get all mystical there, but that's part of that feeling I was talking about when you're exercising and getting outside of your own self like that. That other register of reality that I find useful to think about. How did you even get on this path? How did you trans how did you make this a career? You know, I I do exactly what I have been doing since I was three. I was very lucky to have parents who encouraged me to draw and encouraged me to write. And I just kept doing that. I started doing comics for free in my early twenties after getting out of college. I worked at a feminist newspaper and started doing these silly little cartoons about lesbians because I I was just coming out as a lesbian at that time, and I I called these cartoons dikes to watch out for. And I just started putting them in the paper. And it was in the early 1980s when there just weren't a lot of images of queer people out in the world and people were excited about those. I just, it became like my mission. I just kept doing that. And for many years drew this comic strip, which I was able to start making my living off of when I turned 30. And I did it for twenty five years and then started doing these longer form works, these autobiographical

[23:31]Zibby Owens: memoirs about my family. And now that's what I do. And one of them, you ended up winning a bazillion Tonys, and the play Fun Home won all sorts of awards. Yeah.

[23:42]Alison Bechdel: That was very strange. Yeah. My memoir Fun Home, which is a story about my my dad who it's a story about when I came out to my family in college, I I learned that my dad also was gay or at least bisexual and had been having affairs with other men over the course of my parents' marriage. So that was just mind blowing. And at the same in that same period of my life, very soon after finding out about him, he died in an accident. He was hit by a truck, but my mom and I were pretty sure that was intentional, that he had killed himself. So the memoir was a book I wrote twenty years after that happened. I didn't feel able to do it at the time or, you know, even for, you know, for those two decades. It took me a long time to get my mind around that. And I felt increasingly like I needed to tell that story that it involved these family secrets that I needed to talk about. Like it was part of I felt felt like I couldn't fully properly grieve my father because no one knew the whole story. And I felt like I needed to tell that whole story in order to access my own grief and and be liberated from it, you know, to to move on. So fortunately, it did have that effect writing this story. Oh, and then bizarrely, this, you know, this weird graphic novel about my father's suicide, that turned into a Broadway musical. That was pretty crazy, but it was it was a very wonderful experience and a really, really amazing

[25:13]Zibby Owens: play. Gosh. I wish I had seen it. May we need a revival. Although I read that it's going to be a movie with Jake Gyllenhaal. Is that true or no? Yeah.

[25:21]Alison Bechdel: Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Jake Gyllenhaal will be my dad. Wow.

[25:27]Zibby Owens: Wow.

[25:29]Alison Bechdel: So what are you working on now? Oh gosh. I'm mostly working on publicizing this book and just getting my life in order. When I, you know, I finished the book at the end of last year and drawing a book is a hugely physically intense process. Like I couldn't do anything else. So I'm also just trying to catch up with my life, all the things that got put on hold while I was single mindedly

[25:55]Zibby Owens: drawing the book. So what advice would you have both for aspiring graphic novelists, cartoonists, and and even on the workout front. Let's start with the let's start with aspiring aspiring yous out there. I guess I would

[26:12]Alison Bechdel: my advice would be that maybe the same for for both of those things, people who want to pursue, you know, some creative thing that they enjoy or people who want to work out is to really follow your I know this is very trait, but follow your bliss as Joseph Campbell directed us to do. Like, do the thing that makes you happy, that gives you pleasure. You know, doing something for some other external reason, like because you wanna look different or because you want someone's approval or some, you know, or if you want fame, like, you know, focus on your own internal experience of what feeds you and makes you happy. And then you can't lose because at least you'll be happy whatever happens. That's true. Excellent. Well,

[27:01]Zibby Owens: I'm sorry about your loss and thank you for sharing it. And thank you for sharing about your book. I feel like the act of you sharing it was an act of superhuman strength. So there's Thank you, Sibby.

[27:15]Alison Bechdel: Thanks. Was really fun to talk with you and thanks for all your amazing podcasts. You are indefatigable. It's incredible all the stuff that you're doing.

[27:24]Zibby Owens: Thank you. Trying. I love it. So it's hard to stop. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Well, thank you so much. It was really great to meet you and thanks for sharing Thank you. Likewise. Having this very intense conversation for a Monday morning. Yeah.

[27:37]Alison Bechdel: Thank you so much, Subi. Okay. Take Bye bye.

[27:41]Zibby Owens: Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.