Alison Bechdel faces her sellout fears

Alison Bechdel has been worried about selling out for decades. Not selling out of books — the award-winning graphic novelist has more than enough to go around — but selling out to capitalism for the sake of comfort. The specter of compromising artistic ideals, activist fervor and queer identity to the maw of the monoculture ran through Bechdel’s groundbreaking queer comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," as it built a loyal fanbase in the pages of now-defunct gay and lesbian newspapers. The layers of intellectual insulation that characterize graphic novels like “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” serve to distance Bechdel from the family whose secrets she’s publicly exploring. Her newest book, “Spent: A Comic Novel,” has no choice but to admit that “selling out” is now just selling.

The 25-year run of "Dykes to Watch Out For" followed a group of Sapphic pals and partners whose relationship and interactions seemed to reflect an author in conversation with several possible selves, squabbling and brooding over whose worldview was the right one. Mo, the strip’s main character, was Bechdel’s closest avatar, a self-serious proto-doomer whose fealty to living correctly both as a human and a lesbian put her at perpetual odds with herself, her friends and the world. Like "Where’s Waldo?" by way of the Vermont Country Store, Mo railed and wailed and gnashed her teeth through the strips, turning every engagement with commerce or politics or popular culture (yep, that Bechdel) into a referendum on her own ethical rightness.

With "Spent," Bechdel circles back to DTWOF with an officially autofictional twist: It follows a graphic novelist named Alison Bechdel whose bestselling autobiography about growing up with a taxidermist father, “Death and Taxidermy,” has been turned into an Emmy-winning TV show that goes alarmingly off-book with every new season. (“Fun Home,” Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, entwines her own coming-out story with the suicide of her closeted father, a funeral director.) From her home in Vermont, where she and her sunny, self-sufficient life partner, Holly, run a pygmy-goat sanctuary, Alison stews over what she knows is the highest-class of problems: She hates what’s happened to her emotionally nuanced and highly personal book, but she’s also grown used to a life of farmers-market fleur de sel and creme fraiche — and goat chow doesn’t buy itself.

Alison Bechdel’s "Spent" (HarperCollins ). Alison’s next book, about her own fraught relationship to money, isn’t even outlined but is already on the market. When Alison hears the amount media conglomerate Megalopub has proposed to pay for it, the guilt sends her into an agitated writer’s block shot through with guilt and self-righteousness, made worse by daily bouts of bingeing the news. Holly’s sudden social-media fame as a wood-splitting DIY farm fatale sends Alison into full freakout mode: Maybe she shouldn’t hole up in her studio and write the next book. Maybe she has a duty to use her financial privilege for good — say, in the form of an anticapitalist reality TV show in which she guides consumers away from the jam-packed marketplace of modern life and toward minimal, mindful consumption.

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The consumer critique of "Spent" is one that punches primarily sideways, highlighting how readily Alison betrays her own high ethical and political standards and how reflexively she uses an intellectual gloss to rationalize the betrayals. A gag early in the book has Alison step outside to take in the fresh autumn air and promptly trip over a pile of newly delivered Amazon parcels; as she considers a single toilet brush, “Spent”’s narrator intones, “Where had [Alison’s] youthful idealism gone? Precisely when had her moral erosion begun?” The question brings to mind not only the idealistic young queers of DTWOF, but also the real-life young bookstore employee who, when told that the strip had been adapted as an Audible series with a cast of modern lesbian icons, said she wasn’t planning to listen because “Audible is owned by Amazon . . . I don’t really mess with Amazon. I think that a lot of queer people relate to that.”

Running queasily through the book is Alison’s realization that the more stuff you have, the more you must do to maintain that stuff — and the more that maintenance becomes the work of your life. Holly’s online fame, for instance, results in daily FedEx deliveries from companies seeking a shoutout in her videos, but also leads to a growing preoccupation with monitoring her engagement numbers. Bechdel contrasts the Alisons of present and past by bringing back some of the old DTWOF crew, still loyal to the work of social justice and still living communally — a challenge, thanks to remote work and a couple that’s becoming a throuple. Materially, the housemates’ lives lack the expansiveness and bougie decadence of Alison and Holly’s, but there’s a warmth to the visual depiction of their homey chaos that doesn’t extend to the static artist, pictured alone in a yawning studio space, doomscrolling under the taxidermied head of an enormous moose.

This would all be meta enough, but “Spent’ throws yet another mirror into the mix with Alison’s resentful, Trump-pilled sister, Sheila. Also an artist — her medium is seeds — Sheila has written a counter-memoir that tells her own story of death and taxidermy and demands that Alison edit it. Sheila’s memories are so different from her own that Alison is certain the memoir is bogus; the idea that her sister’s story could simply be different than hers doesn’t seem to cross her mind. Arriving in Los Angeles to pitch the half-baked reality show, she takes the opportunity to lobby “Death and Taxidermy”’s showrunner, unsuccessfully, to rethink the cannibalism and dragons now written into it. (“Alison, it’s called magical realism! And you know as well as I do that when you signed that contract, you gave me the right to use, change, rearrange, adapt, translate, add to, subtract from, and interpolate into the book any elements whatsoever.”)

The struggle to decide just how much of one’s ideals and principles should be compromised in the name of money is up there with the marriage plot and man against nature in eternal literary and pop cultural themes. Both Bechdel and Alison know that they are ideological relics living in a future where selling out has taken on a sepia-toned sentimentality and dodging the tentacles of commerce is a losing game. They also know that the artist, musician, activist or politician who relinquishes their soul to the highest bidder has never been a villain; a righteous refusal to sell out is a stance only made possible by privilege.

By the end of the book, Alison has given up both her distracted attempts to read Marx’s “Capital” and her ego-driven belief that she can somehow stop the Earth from becoming a planet-sized shopping destination. "Spent"’s takeaway isn’t that she, and we, shouldn’t even try; the book’s ending instead suggests that Alison needed that journey to the belly of the showbiz beast to redirect her anxious mind — and that she needs her community so she can stay out of her own head and in the imperfect but joyous life she’s created.

The audiobook edition of Alison Bechdel’s "Spent" comes out on July 15.