Quick Take
Vermont-based graphic novelist Alison Bechdel releases a new illustrated comic novel titled "Spent," in which she examines and spoofs progressives' complicated relationship to money and wealth. She comes to Santa Cruz's Rio Theatre next week.
For the record, Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel, “Spent: A Comic Novel,” was written well before the second inauguration of Donald Trump. But one of the many lines that nicely capture the book’s thorny themes hits particularly close to home in the annus horribilis of 2025. A progressive writer running a pygmy goat farm in Vermont — conveniently also named Alison Bechdel — tells her wife and goat-farming partner, “Okay, we’ll quit Amazon Prime. Right after I order some goat diapers.”
And there it is, the kind of funny-yet-typical moral dilemma that many of us have had to wrestle with in recent months: Where do you draw the line between socio-political action as a citizen and consumer and the dictates of just doing what’s necessary to maintain a living in this crazy world?
In the book, the (barely) fictional Bechdel decides that she has to address a taboo subject in her world of left-liberal, back-to-the-farm types: money. So she opts to write a book on late-stage capitalism. But the first order of business? Figure out exactly, what is “late-stage capitalism”?
Bechdel — the three-dimensional, living, breathing version — visits the Rio Theatre next Wednesday, May 28, in an event presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz.
“Spent” is an example of “autofiction,” a genre that blends autobiography with fiction, i.e. telling your life story but making up characters and situations for the sake of story. Bechdel is a successful cartoonist whose strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” ran in various alternative newspapers for 25 years. In the 2000s, she published a graphic memoir about her childhood, “Fun Home,” that was adapted into a Tony Award-winning stage play. In the new book, the cartoon (read: fictional) version of Bechdel published a similarly successful memoir titled “Death & Taxidermy,” which itself was adapted into a TV series. The deal nets the character a nice chunk of change, but she’s appalled at what the TV producers do with her work. “It’s not just a betrayal of everything the book is about,” says the vegan artist of the TV producers’ decision to have her doppelganger eat a Big Mac, “it’s lazy, a cheap laugh. Bad writing.”
That’s not what happened in real life.
“I was lucky,” said Bechdel in a phone interview. “I did give up creative control to the team who made a musical out of my memoir ‘Fun Home,’ but they did a really good job. But I often feel like, what if it had not worked out that way? What if someone had made a really terrible musical? Then what?”
That fictional artistic betrayal is but a small subplot in the book, but it serves to bring sharper focus on the book’s bigger themes — the contradictions of success, wealth, money for creatives.
“The real motivation behind this book was to think about money,” she said, “and the way money corrupts us, and how we all have to figure out a way to live with varying degrees of complicity with capitalism.”
The comedy comes when hyper politically conscious people try to navigate the fraught waters of modern capitalism and find themselves saying things like, “We should start a cryptocurrency exchange.”
The original idea, Bechdel said, was to do a more straightforward treatment of capitalism and its many discontents: “But I felt like, Oh my God, I don’t want to have to learn all about economics and do all the research I would have to do to intelligently talk about money. It suddenly seemed much more fun to just write a book about someone who’s trying to write a book about money. And then it all fell into place.”
Bechdel also has a complicated relationship with fame, money’s more glitzy counterpart. She is most known, in fact, for something called the “Bechdel test,” which is a theoretical measure of women’s portrayal in film and other forms of fiction. A movie will pass the Bechdel test only if it has two or more female characters who talk to each other about anything other than a man. The idea was a kind of throwaway joke in one of Bechdel’s comic strips years ago, and, because of its pertinence in modern cinema, it took on a life of its own. It’s essentially a meme that Bechdel has exercised little to no control over since it first emerged 40 years ago. She said she is asked about it on average about three times a week.
“It’s the thing I’m most known for,” she said, “which I’ve come to terms with. And, really, as an idea, it’s a very positive one to be associated with. So I have no complaints.”
In doing publicity about “Spent,” she has been asked by interviewers even more about the Bechdel test, but if diving into the subject leads people to the new book, she’s fine with that. She’d rather talk about the challenges and the delights of writing autofiction, especially after the delicate process of writing straight memoir. Yes, she lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly (who is also prominently featured in the book under her own name), but she’s not a goat farmer, and the friends in her book are all characters from her past comic strips.
“If you want to proceed in a way that’s at all ethical,” Bechdel said of writing straight memoir, “you have to constantly be checking with yourself on what’s true and how good and reliable your memory really is. It’s a very introspective and contemplative process. And it was really fun to be utterly free of that in this book, where I could make up whatever I wanted to. And I did.”
Alison Bechdel comes to the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz on Wednesday, May 28, presented by Bookshop Santa Cruz and co-sponsored by Santa Cruz Pride and the Diversity Center. The event begins at 7 p.m.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.