Bookshop Santa Cruz presents: Alison Bechdel | SPENT: A Comic Novel

ABOUT THE EVENT + TICKETS:

Please carefully review your confirmation email for additional information!

This in-person event will include a presentation by the author, including a handcrafted visual slideshow, plus audience Q&A. The event will run approximately one hour. Books will be pre-signed; there will not be a public signing line at the event.

Ticket price is inclusive of ALL taxes and fees. Tickets are final sale and do not qualify for Readers Club credit.

This event is proudly cosponsored by Santa Cruz Pride & The Diversity Center.

Thank you! We can't wait to see you at the event!

ABOUT THE BOOK + AUTHOR:

The celebrated and beloved New York Times bestselling author 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 SPENT, 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.

Alison Bechdel's cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For expanded wildly for her family memoirs, the New York Times bestselling and Time magazine #1 Book of the Year graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? Most recently, The Secret to Superman Strength was named a New York Times Best Graphic Novel of 2021. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow, among many other honors.