Reading List

✓ kingstoken's 2026 Book Bingo: Main Character Over the Age of 30

Spent by Alison Bechdel is a 2025 fictionalized memoir about a cartoonist (coincidentally named Alison Bechdel) who lives on a farm in Vermont with her partner, running a goat sanctuary while trying to write a graphic novel (or maybe it'll be a television show?) about capitalism (or maybe it's about her group of middle-aged queer friends).

The real Alison Bechdel is the creator of the long-running and groundbreaking comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (1983-2008) and the award-winning graphic novel memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2007), and that knowledge is something I think Spent depends on. It's not just that Sparrow, Stuart, Ginger, and Lois—and a grown-up Jiao Raizel—from Dykes to Watch Out For are fictional!Alison's neighbours in this, or that fictional!Alison is grappling with having an autobiographical success publicly leave her creative control through adaptation. The heart of this work exists in a very specific instant, where a queer leftist artist in middle age and the middle class is sitting at a career crossroads in the global car crash of late-stage capitalism, finding herself in an uncertain position between privileged and marginalized, mainstream and fringe, consumer and creator, progressive and out of touch.

My favourite parts of this book were the subplots with the characters from Dykes to Watch Out For—particularly storylines like Stuart and Sparrow expanding their relationship to a throuple, only for their poly kid to nonetheless jump to the conclusion they're both having affairs—and I found myself wishing I were reading it as a serial strip that could add up to more time with them. But that might be saying something about where and when I'd rather be.

This is a book that got me thinking about a lot of its topics, but more through its general timeliness and the role of Bechdel's work in the culture than through a connection with the characters or something in the writing hitting particularly hard. Still, while even the lighter stories didn't quite land in the right place for me to see myself revisiting them on rainy days, I do want to imagine a better future where I get to go back to this book someday and see it as a snapshot of a weird moment in time where we were all trying to figure some stuff out. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as anyone's first Bechdel, but I'm glad I read it.

( An Excerpt )