Second frame of third chapter:

This jumped off the shelf at me when I saw it in a London bookshop last month. Alison Bechdel, who we have met in three previous books, is now running a sanctuary for abandoned goats in rural Vermont, while her partner Holly is becoming an internet influencer thanks to her use of power tools for carpentry. Meanwhile Alison’s successful first memoir, Death and Taxidermy, has become a hit TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch as her father, but veering further and further from Alison’s own lived experience. Her old friends live down the road and are going through their own emotional transformations – there’s a fair bit of over-sixties sex in this book – and incidentally the world is going to hell, with Trumpists threatening civil war, climate catastrophe looming, and incidentally Alison’s MAGA sister writing her own autobiography to set the story straight.

I loved this, and laughed out loud several times on the London Underground and the train while reading it, much to the dismay of fellow passengers. The funniest scene perhaps is when the goats… no, I won’t spoil it for you. There are some serious points as well, both about the state of the world and the limited effect that one individual can have (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try), and also about Life as Art and Art as Life. Recommended. You can get Spent here.