The Secret to Happiness

Alison Bechdel has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace.

- Hanna Rosin

In the opening scene of Spent, billed on its cover as a “comic novel,” Alison Bechdel’s cartoon avatar, also named Alison, has rearranged her sock drawer in an effort to stave off “the feeling of impending doom.” Ever since she was born on the page four decades ago, Bechdel’s fictional self has regularly journeyed between insecure and panicked, conveyed by the artist through subtle downturns in her tiny dash of a mouth. She perseverates about impending nuclear war, environmental disaster, “patriarchal death culture,” girlfriends cheating on her, the local gay bookstore where she works closing down.

For fans who have followed Bechdel from underground lesbian cartoonist in the 1980s to best-selling author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and then watched with amazement as her life on the page went 3-D in a multiple-Tony Award-winning musical, the doom-tinged update in Spent will not come as a shock: She can still get pretty freaked out.

Bechdel’s latest title refers to late-stage capitalism, the semi-facetious frame for the book (which is broken into “episodes” titled “The Commodity,” “The Process of Exchange,” and so on), but like almost everything else in her graphic storytelling, the title is also self-referential: It describes her age and her state of exhaustion, and perhaps hints at a concern that aging lesbians might not command much of an audience. Cartoon Alison now has lines under her eyes and graying hair, though otherwise she looks more or less as she did 40 years ago: butch haircut, eyes wide and worried, hunched shoulders, and, even in her 60s, the air of a teenage boy who does and doesn’t want to be picked for the team.

So imagine my surprise when, toward the end of