Spent: A Comic Novel
  • Published:
    May-2025 (Hardcover)
    May-20-2025 (Release)
  • Formats:
    Print / eBook / Audio
  • Main Genre:
    Graphic Novel
  • Pages:
    256
  • Purchase:
  • Share:
The celebrated and beloved New York Times bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud, brilliant, and passionately political work of autofiction.

In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege?

Meanwhile, Alison's first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It's a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel's beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For).

As the TV show Death and Taxidermy racks up Emmy after Emmy -- and when Alison's Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral -- Alison's own envy spirals. Why couldn't she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…like Queer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!!

Spent's rollicking and masterful denouement -- making the case for seizing what's true about life in the world at this moment, before it's too late -- once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.
People / Creatures
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EDITIONS
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    • First Edition
    • May-2025
    • HarperCollins
    • Hardcover
    • ISBN: 0063278928
    • ISBN13: 9780063278929
    •  
    • May-2025
    • HarperCollins
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 0063278944
    • ISBN13: 9780063278943
    •  
    • May-2025
    • Mariner Books
    • eBook (Kindle)



View the Complete Alison Bechdel Book List