Alison Bechdel Creates An Alternate Reality In New Novel ‘Spent’

Alison Bechdel has never shied away from honesty. Since 1987, when she began drawing herself and her friends in her iconic comic strip series Dykes to Watch Out For, she has captured the reality of lesbian culture and all the drama that comes with it. In her incredibly successful graphic memoir-turned-award-winning musical Fun Home, fans have seen an unforgettably personal side of Bechdel. Not only did lesbians and queer women find representation from the New York Times bestelling author—a massive feat in the early 2000s— they found relatablillity and honesty. 

In 2025, lesbians are portrayed more often in popular media. But, does anyone do it quite as hilariously or heartbreakingly as Bechdel? Her genius is prevalent once again in her newest graphic novel, Spent, which hits the shelves on Tuesday, May 20. Not your typical Bechdel-style memoir, Spent follows “Alison,” a cartoonist who lives in Vermont on a pygmy goat farm with her partner, Holly. Alison is working on a graphic novel about money, but struggles with a harsh political climate, her relationship with her friends, and her recent mainstream success. 

In this piece of autofiction, Bechdel takes more creative liberties with her work. She gives herself a fake Republican sister, makes her real-life partner Holly go viral on Instagram, takes herself to LA, and spends more time with her friends—whom you may recognize from Dykes To Watch Out For. Through the whirlwind of Spent—writer’s block, imposter syndrome, and mounds of anxiety—Alison manages to find something new: happiness.

GO Magazine sat down with Bechdel to discuss Spent, to look back on some of her ground-breaking novels, and to see what’s next.

GO Magazine: All of your writing is very personal. How do you manage to separate the real-life you from the version on the page? 

Alison Bechdel: Well, that was the fun of this book—to play with that space. My last few books have been memoirs in which I tried really hard to be very honest about my real life and very soul-searching about various things, my relationships with my parents, and things like that. This book is not like that at all. It seems like it’s me telling you about my real life, like those earlier books did, but it’s all made up. I don’t really live on a pygmy goat sanctuary. I didn’t really write a book that got turned into a TV show. All that stuff was just fun. And I enjoyed the freedom of making stuff up after all those years of trying to tell the exact truth about my life. 

GO: Even though Spent is more creative than your previous endeavours, there’s still a bit of truth to it. When you were writing, did you have any moments in your everyday life where you thought, “Oh, this would be a great thing to include,” or, “Oh, I’m taking inspiration from this right now?” 

AB: Yeah, I did. It’s a funny process being in the world of a project and in the fictional world that you’re creating. You get very subsumed into it. And, yeah, it was kind of porous. I do something in my real life, or say something to my partner, and I think, “Oh, yeah, gonna put that in the book that’s really funny.” Or she’d say something that was funny. Actually, many of the funniest lines in the book are actual things that she said. I just lifted them. 

GO: What is one thing you envy about book-Alison?

AB: I’m envious of the cats. I don’t actually have five cats. I wish I did. 

GO: Is there anything from the book that you are glad isn’t part of your real life? 

AB: The goats. I really don’t want goats. Very happy to not have a goat farm. And, although in real life I have pursued some television stuff, I’m really glad I’m not doing that. It was fun to take Alison to LA and have her pitch her crazy show, but I wouldn’t want to really live in that.

GO: What was your process like when writing? Did you have a strict outline when you started, or did it come in bursts? 

AB: I did have an outline that I created pretty early on. A rough outline of where I knew this Alison was gonna pitch her show, and go to LA, and her friends were gonna get involved in the throuple, and Holly was going to go viral on the internet. But I didn’t know exactly what those things would look like. So my process was taking that outline and then looking at the news every day, looking at the crazy stuff that was happening in the world, and looking at how people are responding to it. People in my world are processing the rise of MAGA and the incredible polarization and all the crazy things that Trump was doing, even when he wasn’t in office. I wrote this post-COVID from 2022 to 2024. It was pretty dark, scary stuff going on, so it was just a way of channeling all that through the characters, and then a story would somehow come out of that conjunction. 

GO: For many people, the political landscape caused them, at least at first, to shut down and turn away from the news. It seems it had the opposite effect on you. It seems like it lit a fire under you. 

AB: It did. And that was a really positive thing. Even though the subject matter is quite dark, it was fun to be able to do something with my anxiety, and that was different for this book. I was also dealing with those feelings as I worked on my last memoir [The Secret To Superhuman Strength] over a long period of time, which came out in 2021. I was working on that all through the first Trump administration, and the news was just horrifying. I was glued to the news and watching Rachel Maddow every night. It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re in that kind of state. So it took me a very long time to finish that project. But when the subject of my book [Spent] became that craziness, somehow it worked. I was able to channel it and do something productive with it. Then once I was latched onto the story, it was easy not to spend too much time mired in the news because I had all this story I was busy telling.

GO: What moment did the inspiration for Spent come about?

AB: I’m still trying to figure out when it happened exactly because it changed shape. The original idea, and the proposal that I sold to my editor, was for a real, straight-up memoir that was going to be me investigating money and the role of money, not just in my life, but in our world and our political system. But when I started to think about actually writing that, it was like, “Oh my God, I don’t want to research all that stuff. I’d have to read Marx and books about economics, and I don’t want to do that.” And somehow, in that sudden void of like, “Oh no, I just sold this book. What am I gonna do?”, this new idea popped up. What would be really funny is if I’m writing a book about someone who’s trying to write that book. Somehow, that just gave me all of the structure I needed. And this new version just came almost fully-formed into my head, in which my friends are old characters from my comic strip, Dykes To Watch Out For, which I wrote decades ago. They’re all in their 60s now, like me. It was so fun to spend time with these people and see what they’re up to, see how gray their hair is, how much weight they’ve put on, and how they’re getting along with their children.

GO: What was it like revisiting those tropes and characters?

AB: It was really like getting together with long-lost friends, which is interesting because for a long time, I didn’t miss them. I stopped writing that comic strip in 2008, and I was quite ready to be done with it. After 25 years of regular deadlines, it was a relief not to have to think about them constantly, like I had. But I was ready to think about them again. I’m grateful for their comradeship because they’re all still doing the work. They’re all engaged in their communities. One of them is running the gay youth organization. One of them is working for Planned Parenthood. 

GO: Around the time you first created Dykes To Watch Out For, you said you started drawing as a way to see yourself and your friends represented. How has that mission changed for you since then? 

AB: Well, I think my sense of who my people are has expanded. When I was young and starting out, it was lesbians. I wanted to see people who looked like me and my friends, and I just didn’t see that in the culture, so I started drawing it. But over the years, I’ve realized that, yeah, lesbians are cool. I love my ladies, but there’s this larger group of people who I want to connect with. I want to reach a wider audience than I did in my early days, and I’m hoping this book might do that. When I stopped drawing my comic strip in 2008, it was still pretty much a subcultural phenomenon. It was just queer people reading it, but it had started to reach a little further. I had started to add some newspapers. I self-syndicated it, and gradually, I was getting non-gay papers that were carrying it, which was so exciting to me. Like, just because the characters are queer doesn’t mean other people can’t read it. 

GO: What do you hope audiences get out of Spent?

AB: I hope they get a sense of community. For me, that was the great thing about reuniting with those old characters. They did feel like my community. They were my community, in a way, for a long time. And we need community now. We need to get out of our houses where we’re holed up watching Netflix and organize and resist.

GO: Are there any easter eggs in the book that Vermonters can look out for? 

AB: Oh, yeah. There’s a bunch of stuff. There’s a farmer’s market that was really fun to draw. A big page spread on the farmer’s market. There’s an extended sequence about the floods we had in Vermont. That actually becomes a big plot point—people going to help with the flood, clean up, and talking about climate change. And we see scenes of Montpelier, the state capital…I love Vermont because it’s a really special place. It’s a very small state, and that gives it a special quality where people just really treat each other with respect. It’s not perfect, but it’s a communal place where you know your neighbors, you know your legislators, and you run into them at the farmers market. Bernie Sanders is in my farmers market scene. 

GO: When you are working on a novel, what are the essentials you have with you? 

AB: My phone. I use either a voice memo or, if it’s something complicated, I use an app called “Things,” which is a database for your to-do list. I think someone should study my use of this app because it’s got thousands of items in it. It’s not meant to be used the way I use it. It’s filled with ideas for books, but it’s supposed to be like, “Go pick up milk.”… I used to keep a spreadsheet on my computer for a long time, and before that, in the real olden days, I would have notes with pencil and paper.

GO: Were you inspired by any other artists or writers for Spent?

AB: I was inspired for this book by the work of Hergé, who did the Tintin comics. I just have always loved these stories. These are very immersive tales with beautiful, full-color drawings, and I wanted that for adults. I wanted a story like that for grown-ups. And so I made one.

GO: How do your friends and your partner feel about their portrayals in your books? 

AB: I had to do a lot of negotiation with my partner, because she really does figure quite largely in [Spent]. I had to let her approve everything I wrote for her character. She still isn’t totally psyched about what I’ve done. She’s like, “You should have given me more lines.” On the other hand, I have this fake sister in the book, Sheila, who’s this right-wing MAGA person. In my experience of writing about my actual family, writing Fun Home, I had various family members weigh in on that, and have seen how it has affected them over time. I realized that they all had their own versions of what happened in our family, and it wasn’t just me telling the one true story. I kind of played with that with the character of Sheila, and Alison realizing the world doesn’t revolve around her.

GO: In one of the first scenes where Sheila’s character is introduced, Alison goes to her Facebook page, which is covered in right-wing posts. It was almost too relatable. 

AB: I actually took some of those posts from an actual family member’s Facebook page. 

GO: Have you ever wanted to use something in a book, but it was too personal? Or wished you hadn’t included something in hindsight? 

AB: In a way, I sort of feel like that about my entire book, Are You My Mother?, which is a memoir of my mother. I have mixed feelings about it. A part of me regrets putting my mother through her daughter writing personal, private stuff about her life that she would much rather other people not know. But I did it. I somehow felt like I had to do it at the time. And I worked it out with her in our in our way. We came to some kind of understanding. I don’t exactly regret writing the book, but I have ambivalence about it.

GO: When you write something that’s happened to you, does it give you a different perspective on how the situation was handled? 

AB: In a way, that’s why I wrote memoirs about both of my parents. It was a way of figuring out our relationship that I could only do through writing. Through really turning it into a story, figuring out what the themes were, what the meaning of things was, and trying to make sense of it. That’s how I process the world, by writing and drawing stories. And yes, I do feel, in both of those cases, that I came to an understanding about my parents and about our relationship that I had not had before. And in both cases, I think it was, in general, a process of just becoming more compassionate toward them.  

GO: Now that Spent is complete, you have your book tour coming up. Is there anything you’re looking forward to doing once you have a break? 

AB: I wish I could chill, but this year is just really crazy. Actually, I’m having a very wonderful exhibition of my work at a museum in Switzerland that opens this summer. So, pretty much right after the book tour, I’m going to be going to Europe. I know that’s not a bad thing! And I’ve also started teaching. So I have a little tiny break in August, but then I start teaching in the fall, so it’s a very busy year.

Spent hits the shelves on Tuesday, May 20. You can find Alison on her book tour across the country through June 12. Her exhibit at Cartoonmuseum Basel in Switzerland opens on July 5, 2025.