The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021)

Bechdel's most physical book, colored with her partner Holly Rae Taylor. Published in 2021, it moves chronologically from the 1960s to the 2020 pandemic through her running, karate and a long parade of exhausting workout crazes, and sets her search for fitness beside writers who chased inner transformation, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Jack Kerouac and Adrienne Rich. It is dense, with long detours into those lives, so it suits readers who enjoy literary history alongside memoir. The payoff is a funny, rueful portrait of a body that keeps trying to fix the mind. Pick it up when Are You My Mother? felt too inward and you want a memoir that gets outdoors.