Welcome to GabFest Reeds for June 2025. I'm David Plotz, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest. We get to combine two of my favorite things this week, Vermont and Allison Beckdale.

Allison has a new comic graphic novel. Is it a novel? We'll discuss, is it a novel? She calls it a novel, but the lead character is a person named Allison, Bacdell, who is a graphic artist and writer living in Vermont. The new novel is called Spent. It is about, what is it about? It's about making art under capitalism. It's about community. It's about

what it is like to live in a world which is abusive and dark, but yet is filled with rich

emotional connection. It is extremely funny, both in its language and in its art. And for a book about the viciousness of

capitalism and the declining world, it is also mighty sweet. So, Alison, welcome back to the

Gab Fest from Vermont. Hello. Hi, David. I'm so happy I get to talk about this book with you.

So what is spent? What is it about? Why did you write it? Well, you just gave a really

great encapsulation of it. It's about all those things. It is, as you say, a novel, or I guess

I'm thinking of it as a kind of auto fiction, since it features a character who looks very much

like me and has my name. But it didn't start out that way. It started out to be a memoir, like a more kind of

serious memoir project about money and just about how, yeah, what you just said about how

what it's like to live in a capitalist system and especially one that has run so wildly

amok. You know, money just seems like the big elephant in the room right now that's wrecked everything.

So I wanted to investigate it.

But when I sat down to write a memoir and realized, oh, my God, I'm going to have to read about economics.

Too bad I never studied that in college.

Too bad I was reading semi in college. Too bad I was

reading semiotics instead. And now I know nothing about how the world works. I didn't want to do

all that research. So I felt like I had a moment of hopeless panic, like, oh my God, now what?

And then I realized, oh, it will be much more fun to write a book about someone who's trying to write that money memoir and failing.

So that's what happened.

As you say, there's a doppelganger, Alison Vectel, who I was looking, she has more wrinkles than you do.

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