ALISON BECHDEL | Spent

'The funniest, most satirical cartoon she has ever written – as well as, perhaps, the most prescient'

OBSERVER

"Very funny and self-hating in a good way"

ZADIE SMITH

From her pygmy goat farm in Vermont, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathing memoir about her own greed and privilege?But how can she just sit around writing a book when the world is hanging on a thread?In this hilariously skewering comic novel, Alison is existentially pained by a climate-challenged world and a country on the brink of civil war. Her first graphic memoir about growing up with her taxidermist father has been adapted into a highly successful TV series, Death and Taxidermy. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group.

As the TV show racks up Emmy after Emmy, Alison’s own envy spirals. Surely writing her own wildly popular reality TV series wouldn’t be that hard? One that shows people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!In Spent, the celebrated, bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud and passionately political work of autofiction, and once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times) than the real Alison Bechdel.

. . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven.


Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) adult love life.

And, finally, back to Mother to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.