Alison Bechdel‘s cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For grew wildly in response to her graphic memoirs, the best-selling Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, Are You My Mother?, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. To many, her name is synonymous with the Bechdel Test, a metric to evaluate a film’s representation of women. Her new book, Spent: A Comic Novel, hilariously skewers the absurdities of modern life while delivering a rollicking case for embracing life’s messy truths before it’s too late. In Spent, a fictional version of Bechdel lives on a goat sanctuary in Vermont, where she is visited by the older versions of the central characters of Dykes to Watch Out For among others. On May 27, 2025, Alison Bechdel came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to read from her work, show slides, and answer questions from her fans. She was introduced by artist Wendy MacNaughton.