As the creator of the comic “Dykes to Watch Out For” and memoir-turned-Broadway-musical “Fun Home,” Alison Bechdel understands why readers of her new graphic novel, “Spent,” may think it’s autobiographical.
The main character is a cartoonist named Alison who sketches works such as “Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For” when she isn’t wrestling with the same questions dogging the artist drawing her.
“How is she supposed to sit here writing a book when the world hangs by a thread?” asks an opening panel of the novel.
But within the 272 pages of fiction is one fact: Both the real and make-believe Alison love the state they’re in.
“Vermont plays a big role in this book,” Bechdel told a crowd in Norwich this past week at the start of a regional publicity tour. “It’s almost like a character that, in so many ways, has made my life and work possible.”
Bechdel, 64, has journeyed from underground press to mainstream success since moving to what she calls the “cerulean blue” Green Mountains at 30. She sparked the term “Bechdel test” in 1985 to see whether a creative work has at least two women talking about something other than a man. She won a $625,000 MacArthur “genius” grant in 2014, and saw “Fun Home” win the Tony Award for best musical in 2015.
Bechdel and her wife, artist Holly Rae Taylor, were cooped up in their Bolton home during the pandemic when the cartoonist began brainstorming her latest book.
“It felt like money was really at the root of all of the really serious problems facing us — the climate, technology, homelessness, addiction, polarization — so I thought maybe I could solve them all by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about capitalism,” she said.
Bechdel piled up texts such as Karl Marx’s three-volume opus on economic theory.
“I suddenly realized it would be much more fun to write a book about a cartoonist named Alison who’s trying to write a memoir about capitalism,” she said.
“Spent” opens with the protagonist roaming around Burlington. At the Onion River Co-op, she scans shelves of oat milk, goat milk and stoat milk. Near the airport, she shudders at the “VROOSH!” sound of a Vermont National Guard F-35 fighter jet as a tourism poster for flaming fall foliage promises “No Need for LSD.”
Moving on to Montpelier, characters from Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For” are pictured cleaning up from the past two summers of record rainfall.
“This is the second ‘hundred-year’ flood since I was a kid,” a college student tells a friend amid signs for downtown’s Charlie-O’s bar and Bear Pond Books.
Later in St. Johnsbury, the pair stage a climate protest at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium.
“Two were arrested for throwing ginger black currant kombucha,” a radio station announces shortly after.
Back at the main character’s home, author and activist Bill McKibben makes a cartoon cameo on roller skis. Finally at a nearby farmers market, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Becca Balint browse booths for “Vermont maple CBD beard oil” and “free range, pasture-raised, certified humane, non-GMO, local, AI-free” eggs.
All that said, the self-billed “comic novel” isn’t kid stuff.
“There’s sex in the book, gratuitous nudity, pickleball, polyamory,” Bechdel cautioned her audience.
That didn’t stop 200 people from filling every seat at the Norwich event and similar programs selling out this month in Burlington, Hardwick and Montpelier.
Reviews are equally enthusiastic.
“If these characters are sad and bewildered by the state of the world, their frustration feels like a reassurance to readers who share it, and perhaps a gentle reminder that it’s easy to confuse being socially conscious with being self-serious,” the New York Times wrote.
The Washington Post praised the book’s “charming, funny, sincere portrait of a Vermont community.”
“The veneer of fiction gives Bechdel that much more permission to go broad as she takes aim at the proclivities of lefty Vermonters, herself included, who long to reclaim their old activist passions but can’t quite escape the comforts of Burlington and its environs,” the Post wrote.
In a story titled “What Is Alison Bechdel’s Secret?” The Atlantic noted that “the cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace.”
Bechdel cautiously agrees.
“By the end of the book, Alison is finally able to actually be in the moment,” the author said. “She starts to notice little details — little newts, little fiddleheads — until her watch alarm goes off.”
Bechdel pointed to her drawing of its ironic, interrupting digital message: “Reduce stress by taking time to reflect.”
“Despite all of my serious worries about the state of the world right now, I also feel weirdly hopeful,” Bechdel said. “Maybe this onslaught we’re experiencing is what it takes for us to finally achieve enough solidarity to turn things around.”
