BookBrowse Reviews Spent by Alison Bechdel

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Award-winning graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel returns with a metafictional comic novel that explores the importance of community and the power of artistic expression amid an uncertain future.

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They say every author puts a little of themselves into their work, but the brilliant Alison Bechdel has taken the expression to a new level in Spent, a rollicking, metafictional graphic novel. Bechdel has inserted herself and her real-life partner Holly into a somewhat heightened reality in which she confronts aging, attempts to maintain artistic integrity in the age of the viral video, and spends some time with old friends from her literary past.

Bechdel's readers will be familiar with her skyrocketing rise to fame after the release of her coming-of-age graphic memoir Fun Home, which centered on her fraught relationship with her father, who ran a funeral home out of their house and alternately terrorized and fascinated his family; the book was aptly subtitled "a family tragicomic" and was subsequently turned into an award-winning Broadway show. Her more hardcore fans will fondly recall her fabulous Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip (see Beyond the Book), which she published in queer and alternative newspapers from 1983 to 2008. The comic followed a circle of lesbian friends as they navigated relationships, bitched about their jobs, and strove for equality and better lives for their community.

Spent takes these two worlds—the reality of Bechdel's life as a famous cartoonist and the fictional world of her early work—and throws them together to create a mashup of real life and fantasy, in which Bechdel reexamines her artistic career and struggles to decide if her work has made the difference she was hoping it would. Has she done her part to make the world a better, more accepting place, or is she just another sellout, happy to cash in her royalty check and run her rescue pygmy goat farm? Has she, in fact, become the thing she once swore to fight to her dying breath?

Spent has changed some aspects of Bechdel's life: In the book, her late father was not a funeral director but a taxidermist with a penchant for stuffing endangered animals; and instead of a Broadway musical, her landmark graphic novel has become a multi-season HBO series called Death and Taxidermy, adored by millions but detested by Alison, although the money has been nice. The friends she and Holly meet up with for watch parties turn out to be several of the core characters from Dykes to Watch Out For, who have a few more grey hairs but are still striving to live their best, most authentic lives in the 2020s. Lois, who spent her youth as an unapologetic lothario and champion for social justice, has been besieged by internet trolls and death threats after FOX News aired footage of her leading a Gender Identity and Expression class. Stuart and Sparrow, DTWOF's longest running couple, are confronting an empty nest and the possibility of becoming a throuple with an old friend now that their non-binary child J.R. is gone at college. And professor Ginger is still navigating the murky waters of academia, though she's finally overcome her commitment phobia and is in a loving long-distance relationship.

As for Alison, with Death and Taxidermy in its final season, she needs to get herself in gear with a new book: $um: An Accounting, a new memoir about money, or "a lens into the over-consumption, inequality, endless growth and media consolidation of late-stage capitalism!" She needs the money—she and Holly can't afford their comfortable life in Vermont on Holly's revenue from her handmade compost bin business alone. (Those pygmy goats aren't going to feed themselves!) Then, as she struggles to overcome her writer's block, one of Holly's woodworking videos goes viral and Alison suddenly finds herself part of the problem—the attention-span-destroying, sheep-creating, megacorp problem—and not the scrappy warrior for social justice she always envisioned herself as.

This is a hilarious and utterly charming graphic novel that has all the self-deprecating wit and wisdom readers have come to expect from Bechdel. With her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, she lovingly skewers the forward-thinking, socially conscious intellectuals who struggle tirelessly against "the man" but would also like to keep their Amazon deliveries and rack up their TikTok likes. It also reads as a love letter to the wonderful and wacky Dykes to Watch Out For characters she clearly adores, a sort of literary thank you to them for helping her toward the success she enjoys today. Seeing so many beloved faces from Bechdel's formative and inspiring comic after many years away is sure to be a heartwarming experience for any DTWOF fan. Bechdel provided deeply meaningful representation for many marginalized people at a time when such a thing was hard to find, and it feels wonderfully right for her to give her readers time with them again.

Community and the power it has to cultivate love and positive change in the world is always at the heart of Bechdel's work. The biggest struggle for DTWOF's protagonist, Mo, was always an inability to understand the inherent value in turning to community in times of need and hardship. When book-Alison finally overcomes her writer's block, she declares that "I figured out what was wrong with me! I was paralyzed because I thought I somehow had to fix everything myself."

Bechdel also excels at reminding her readers of the beauty of the quieter moments in life, like Alison preparing an elaborate coffee tray for Holly every morning, and Sparrow and Stuart embracing their polyamorous relationship: "How did we ever fall for the idea that love was finite?" Sparrow muses to Stuart after spending their first night with another. There might be a few more lines on their faces and grey hairs on their heads, but Bechdel and her fictional, funny friends have never been more relevant or more needed.

This review first ran in the May 21, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.