Spent by Alison Bechdel review – the graphic novelist faces up to midlife

In this playfully fictionalised memoir, Alison runs a pygmy goat sanctuary while making a name for herself on stage and screenAlison Bechdel emerged in the 1980s with Dykes to Watch Out For, a groundbreaking weekly strip that featured a group of mostly lesbian friends. Since then, her acclaimed graphic novels have focused mainly on herself and her family. Fun Home in 2006 (exploring her closeted, funeral-director father’s suicide and her coming out) was followed by Are You My Mother? (psychoanalysis and her relationship with her mother) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (her compulsive exercising, from karate and crunches to snowshoeing).These three erudite, pensive and observant works spend most of their time looking back. Where the modern Bechdel is present, she is mostly sketching, editing and narrating her past, and contemplating how everyone from Jack Kerouac and Virginia Woolf to paediatrician Donald Winnicott can help her shed light on it. Continue reading...

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