Spent: A Comic Novel
About this audiobook
Brought to you by Penguin.
From her pygmy goat farm in Vermont, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathing memoir about her own greed and privilege?
But how can she just sit around writing a book when the world is hanging on a thread?
In this hilariously skewering comic novel, Alison is existentially pained by a climate-challenged world and a country on the brink of civil war.
Her first graphic memoir about growing up with her taxidermist father has been adapted into a highly successful TV series, Death and Taxidermy. It’s a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group.
As the TV show racks up Emmy after Emmy, Alison’s own envy spirals. Surely writing her own wildly popular reality TV series wouldn’t be that hard? One that shows people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!
In Spent, the celebrated, bestselling author of the modern classic Fun Home presents a laugh-out-loud and passionately political work of autofiction, and once again proves that “nobody does it better” (New York Times) than the real Alison Bechdel.
'The funniest, most satirical cartoon she has ever written – as well as, perhaps, the most prescient' OBSERVER
© Alison Bechdel 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
About the author
Alison Bechdel is the author of three internationally acclaimed graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller, won an Eisner Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named a Best Book of the 21st Century by the Guardian, was adapted to a broadway musical which won five Tony Awards and is currently being adapted for cinema. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life - queer and otherwise - considered 'one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre'. Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2014 she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur 'Genius' Award.
http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/
