Skip to main content

"Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened" by Allie Brosh



      Hyperbole and a Half is a blog written and run by Allie Brosh in which she uses a combination of web comic and narrative prose to describe stories of her childhood, incidences with her dogs, and advice based on her observations of adulthood. Using an intentionally artistically crude drawing style (rendered in the Mac Paintbrush program) coupled with observational and absurdist humour, Brosh has gained internet popularity since 2009 as a blogger willing to speak bluntly and openly about her own struggles with depression, social anxiety, ADHD, chronic procrastination, and other conditions. Several of her comic drawings have exceeded well beyond her blog and achieved meme status on social networking websites like Reddit, Tumblr, and Imgur.

***

      In October 2011, Brosh made a blog entry which displayed in detail her experiences with depression, which was praised both by followers of her blog and by practicing psychologists as one of the best non-medically written, and insightful descriptions of depression from the point of view of someone suffering from the illness rather than from the point of view of a medical professional observing the effects of the illness. After this post, Brosh’s blog went silent with no new material posted for over a year, causing concern among her readers. While she issued a statement regarding her absence from the blog, and answered questions during a Q&A thread on Reddit, it wasn’t until May of 2013 that a follow-up comic “Depression Part Two” was posted on her blog continuing the narrative and including a discussion on her suicidal feelings. The popularity of Brosh’s blog was seen when the post got 1.5 million views in a single day.
***
      In October 2013, Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened was released. This book contains several of the classic and popular comics/posts from her blog (including Depression Parts One and Two), plus about ten new stories not ever published on the blog--like the first chapter in which Brosh tells of the time when (at age twenty-seven) she found the time capsule she had buried at the age of ten containing a letter written to her future self. The letter concludes with the request that her future self “please write back”; a request with which Brosh not only complies but also expands to include letters to her past self at various other ages as well. For example: “Dear Two-year-old, face cream is not edible--no matter how much it looks like frosting, no matter how many times you try--it’s always going to be face cream and it’s never going to be frosting. I promise I wouldn’t lie to you about this. It’s honestly never going to be frosting. For the love of ****, please stop. I need those organs you’re ruining” (pages 8-9).

***
      I think that what so many people (myself included) find appealing about Brosh’s writing/comic style is how approachable it is. While she's telling stories about her own life and her own weird experiences, they hit so close to home for so many people in the millennial generation who are approaching or already in their mid-twenties. When I first started following the Hyperbole and a Half blog and then later was reading the book, I started to loose track of how many times I found myself thinking "There are other people who think this way? Oh thank goodness I thought I was alone and weird." But I'm not alone, there are apparently millions of people who have similar experiences and mental processes. And we're all pretty weird. And are drawn to Brosh's deliberately simplistic drawing style and hyper-descriptive narrative text. Her story-telling method is very fluid, inserting the Paintbrush drawings so seamlessly that they are so much a part of the story that to remove them and replace them with strictly typed words describing what the drawing was attempting to convey would be akin to removing one of your kidneys and replacing it with a balloon filled with pudding. Sure it’s still vaguely kidney-shaped, and you’d still have the other kidney to take up the slack, but pretty soon you’re going to notice something’s missing. Also, you’ll probably get some kind of infection. And if that metaphor sounded weird and slightly disturbing then I’ve successfully conveyed the type of humour Brosh uses in her writing.
***
      Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened is available in the catalogue at the Ocean City Free Public Library.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fault Lines by Nancy Huston

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2008, Fault Lines takes an interesting narrative approach and follows four generations of a family counter-chronologically. Family secrets start to unravel as each generation's character is revealed. We first meet 6 year old Sol, a coddled spoiled brat of a character, as he and his family are on a trip to Germany to revisit a long-lost relative. Huston then introduces the reader to the other generations; his father Randall, grandmother Sadie, and great grandmother Erra. As each character's story unfolds, you can see how each narrative weaves into one. The last section, which centers on Erra, is the most eye-opening one and is the final piece of the novel's puzzle. I don't want to say much more because it'd be giving too much away, but suffice it to say, it's a pretty intense (and sad) read.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

A short but very moving tale about a man who uncovers the awful truth about a former lover. Michael is 15 when he first meets Hanna, who is 36. Despite the creepy age difference, the two become lovers, though Michael is far more captivated by the mysterious and distant Hanna than she is to him. Their affair is all too brief and one day, Hanna just disappears. Years later, Michael unintentionally sees Hanna as the defendant when he is observing a court case for law school. As Michael slowly learns about Hanna's horrible past, he must struggle to accept the question - if he loves (or loved) a monster, what does that make him? There is redemption in the end, but it's very bittersweet. And of course, they made a movie out of this one. If the weather is decent, perhaps I'll go see it this weekend - Kate Winslet is supposed to be fabulous.

"A Banquet of Consequences" by Elizabeth George

      Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mystery series is probably one of my favourites in the style of English detective stories. It's the series that I keep returning to, when I slip into a reading rut and can't focus on reading something new, particularly to the first book in the series A Great Deliverance. While there are lots of decent mystery series circulating now, the first book in George's Lynley stories has a certain grim insistence about it that keeps drawing me back to it. And in her latest contribution to the series, George has written a story that in many aspects parallels her first--however, these parallels did not become immediately apparent until the climax of the story.       One of the things that I like best about Elizabeth George's writing is that she realises that a lot of times, the supporting characters can have better story potential than the main title character. She uses this to her advantage in almost all of the Lynley seri...