In 1982, the year Alison Bechdel penned the drawing that would become the first installment of her iconic comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, Ronald Reagan was president. That September, the Center for Disease Control first used the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to describe the mysterious, rare pneumonia infecting previously healthy individuals at an unprecedented rate. Now, amidst attacks from the new administration on hard-won LGBTQ rights, Bechdel is back with a new book: Spent: A Comic Novel (Bookshop.org).
With that in mind, perhaps it’s no surprise that, when I asked Bechdel what it was like to create art in times like these, the first words out of her mouth were — “Oh, God.”
“In a way, it’s always a crisis,” she went on. “And then, along comes this real crisis, and your adrenal glands are already empty. It’s so strange to me, this moment.” She paused, staring somewhere above the webcam. “I’m still trying to adjust to this horrifying new reality.”
Bechdel is no stranger to changing tides. In 1985, Bechdel wrote the comic strip that coined her eponymous Bechdel Test. Twelve years later, in 1997, Ellen Degeneres came out as a lesbian on the cover of Time Magazine. In 2006, Bechdel published Fun Home, the memoir (and later Broadway musical) that cemented her as the definitive cartoonist of lesbian life. Nine years after that, in 2015, marriage equality was granted in all 50 states.
Now, in the midst of this particular horrifying reality, Bechdel is taking what she considers to be her first turn at fiction (spoiler alert: the main character is a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel). Spent, which released yesterday, is a departure from her career as a memoirist (Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength) – but, in a way, her truest creation yet.
In Spent, fictional-Alison runs a pygmy goat sanctuary in rural Vermont with the help of her wood-chopping influencer partner, Holly. As the TV-adaptation of her famous memoir Death and Taxidermy continues to skyrocket in popularity, fictional Alison reckons with how to live ethically in a world that is both rife with social challenges and suffocating under a heavy blanket of carbon emissions. The novel takes a tender lens to its characters, who range from picket-happy college kids to an aging couple newly wading into the waters of polyamory. A sense of community abounds in Spent; as much as it’s about fictional Alison’s personal journey, it is in equal measure a call-to-action toward mutual aid and togetherness. It would be impossible to call the small town Vermont which Bechdel pens a utopia (with the carbon and all), but Spent never ceases to remind us that the strong ties of community bring us as close to utopia as we can get.
After spending so many years working very hard to write the precise truth about my life, it was just a blast to make shit up.
The departure into fiction came as a surprise even to Bechdel, who had never seriously considered writing fiction. Even Dykes to Watch Out For, a highly satirical project, didn’t feel fictional to her. To Bechdel, “[the comic] was almost a kind of reporting or journalism, in a way, because I was trying not just to tell a story, but to reflect the culture and the community that I was a part of. So, even though all the characters are made up, and the storylines are made up, I didn’t feel like I was making them up.”
Dykes to Watch Out For doesn’t feel made up, either. In that way, Bechdel’s oeuvre is Rockwellian – fiction that is somehow truer than truth.
I asked Bechdel about Rockwell, and how she felt to know her work had taken on a similar flavor of authentic documentary for the lesbian community. “Rockwell is such a funny figure,” Bechdel mused, “because that sort of nostalgia can be not a good thing. But, what I loved about his work was how authentic the images were. It wasn’t just a chair. It was a very particular chair.” (Bechdel is serious about this. In a 1990 interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune, she said of Rockwell, “I love how authentic he was, how he would draw a real, actual chair.”)
Still, with a tone of warning, she added, “I wouldn’t want to think of [Dykes to Watch Out For] as some kind of nostalgic look back, because I think that’s all still happening. I am still alive.” She added, “I love that young people find something to relate to in it. But, on the other hand, it’s kind of sad that things are still the same, if not much worse.”
Bechdel’s work is unflinchingly committed to truth and authenticity. Even with Spent, she hadn’t intended to break from memoir. The plan was another memoir, this one about Bechdel’s efforts to live an ethical life within a capitalist system.
This was in line with Bechdel’s prior memoirs, each of which churns around different preoccupations. In Fun Home, it was how to make sense of her complex childhood and her relationship with her father. In Are You My Mother?, it was the ethics of memoir, and the story she wanted to tell about her mother. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, her critical gaze turned toward self-improvement, both internal and external.
However, when she sat down to work on this project, her usual impulses strayed.
“When I got out my big, thick volume of [Karl Marx’s Das] Kapital, I was like, oh, my God, I can’t do this. This is really boring. All of a sudden, as soon as I realized that, I thought, what if I’m writing not a memoir about money, but a book about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, who’s trying to write a book about money?”
A new fervor of creative energy creeped into Bechdel’s voice and she grew animated. “The three memoirs I had written previously were these long, searching projects of just scraping up everything from my past and mucking around in it, and hoping that some kind of narrative through-line would emerge, right? But for this book, I could just make the story.”
This process involved a foray from Bechdel’s usual form of paleontology.
“I went back and took my characters from Dykes to Watch Out For, my comic strip from a hundred-thousand years ago, and I brought them into this new scenario, this new kind of autofictional world where they’re my friends – my actual friends, not my characters.”
Throughout her years of memoir, Bechdel was wracked by the anxiety of how those in her life might react to their renderings. Here, there was no such concern. When Spent delves into a plotline about the highly unfaithful for-TV adaptation of Death and Taxidermy (the fictional-Alison’s version of Fun Home), Bechdel didn’t need to worry about hurt feelings. She was liberated by the power to disclaim – “I talked to Lisa Kron, who adapted Fun Home into the musical and said, ‘Look, this isn’t about you. It’s not about the play. I’m just riffing.’”
I confessed to Bechdel that I didn’t originally read Spent as fictional, despite its subtitle. I wanted to believe in the pygmy goat sanctuary! I asked her what she thought about the idea that readers might mine this book for the truth that is available in her other works, and she smiled.
“I think that’s part of what I was playing with. Almost as if I were obscuring my own tracks. Do I really have a pygmy goat sanctuary? No, I don’t. So can you really trust anything I’ve ever said? I’m not sure.”
It’s something [the right thinks] they can control, whereas they can’t control the internet. If they could, they would, but they can’t. So they pick on queer authors.
Fiction provided space for a different kind of honesty – the kind that, like Dykes to Watch Out For, is honest not because it is one person’s truth, but rather because it is the truth of thousands. Plus, it’s fun – “It was very freeing,” Bechdel went on. “After spending so many years working very hard to write the precise truth about my life, it was just a blast to make shit up.”
Spent is a testament to the fact that, despite the harrowing nature of this political moment, there is still fun to be had. Still, Bechdel knows as well as anyone the consequences of work that lays bare identity and difference. PEN America found that in the 2023-2024 school year alone, Fun Home was banned from K-12 schools 10 times, in six different states.
In a 2012 interview, Bechdel attributed the bans of Fun Home, in part, to the power of images, saying, “I’m sure that library’s got all kinds of gay material in it. But, if they’re just regular books with no cartoon illustrations, there’s not the same kind of concern about it.”
More than 10 years –and many bans– later, her sentiments have evolved. “I think everything is getting banned, whether it’s graphically explicit or not. But still, images seem to freak people out more.” She went on, “I think it’s a displaced anxiety, as someone says on a panel in Spent. It’s something [the right thinks] they can control, whereas they can’t control the internet. If they could, they would, but they can’t. So they pick on queer authors.”
Still Bechdel remains hopeful. “I feel terrified, and I feel hopeful. But the hope is about getting back to this communal mission that I was immersed in as a young person. And now it’s a matter of survival. We have to get back to joining together with other people, to go out and protest.” She added, “It’s hard and serious work, but it’s also fun to be with other people.”
In a way, that’s what Bechdel’s new book is all about.
I feel terrified, and I feel hopeful. But the hope is about getting back to this communal mission that I was immersed in as a young person. And now it’s a matter of survival. We have to get back to joining together with other people, to go out and protest
Per its jacket copy, Spent is about a fictionalized Alison Bechdel. But really, it’s about other people. It’s about the way a community can distribute across many backs and shoulders the weight of existential dread. It’s about realizing the kids are all right. It’s about having or not having a pygmy goat farm (who’s to say!). It’s about learning and re-learning yourself again and again, no matter your age. It’s about drawing a particular chair.
Bechdel’s latest is a celebration of the joy and hope to be found in community, and the power only fiction has to expose a special kind of truth –literary and universal– that binds us.
Claire Fennell is a consultant to PEN America’s Literary Programs and a Publicity Assistant at Penguin Random House. Claire’s work is featured or forthcoming in Maudlin House, WAS Quarterly, Bullshit Lit (The Second Bullshit Anthology), and Daily Drunk Mag, among others. Claire is currently working on their debut novel. Learn more at clairefennell.com.
