by Alison Bechdel
Overall: I love graphic memoirs, and this is such an amazing addition to the genre. You may be familiar with Alison Bechdel from Fun Home, her first book, which was made into a Tony-Award-winning play. Bechdel examines her lifelong relationship with exercise in her latest book, beginning with her discovery of running in late childhood, through her infatuation with downhill skiing, cross country skiing, biking, yoga, and many other types of physical exertion. Somehow, she manages to weave in the Romantic poets, the Transcendentalists (especially Margaret Fuller, who gets a mini biography), Jack Kerouac, and lots about Buddhism in a way that is both thoughtful and deeply felt. The book is broken up into sections for each decade of her life and becomes a meditation on aging and mortality.
Likes: Bechdel’s illustrations, honed over her years of producing her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, are amazing. The pacing of the memoir is strong, with Bechdel’s story unfolding alongside the stories of other humans who have grappled with understanding the mind-body connection. Bechdel is also honest about her foibles, missteps, and decisions she made that in retrospect make very little sense. And her wry sense of humor (often accentuated or punctuated by the illustrations) balances some of the darker subject matter, such as the deaths of her parents, her struggles with alcohol and prescription painkillers, and depression.
Dislikes: nothing really.
FYI: suicide, death of a parent, addiction (alcohol, drugs, prescription painkillers), depression, sudden death.
Liz Helfrich 