★★★★★ Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh
Allie Brosh knows your secret thoughts...
Hyperbole and a Half:Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Allie Brosh
Allie Brosh knows your secret thoughts...
...because they are also Allie Brosh's secret thoughts.
The first thing that struck me when I received Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (hereafter abbreviated 1.5H) was that it was striped:
I opened it up to investigate the cause of this external appearance, and that was my downfall. Here's what that thin green stripe at the top looks like when opened up
The green stripe is the first chapter of 1.5H, entitled "Warnings". It's an utterly brilliant story about a time-traveling child. It is still my favorite story in the book. I don't know if that's because it is genuinely the funniest, or if it is merely that it was my first exposure to The Full Allie. Even now, when I already know all the jokes, it has not lost its power to make me laugh out loud.
The striped appearance is because each story is written on a solid color background. "Warnings" is followed by "The Simple Dog" in yellow, etc. Now, if you look carefully at the picture, you'll see that not every chapter gets its own color. There's a lot of white. The white chapters, it turns out, are more in the nature of essays than stories. Here are their titles: "Motivation", "Depression Part One", "Depression Part Two", "Thoughts and Feelings", and "Identity Part One". There is also a chapter called "Identity Part Two", but it is more of a story than an essay, so it's in light blue.
"Motivation" is about procrastination. Have a quote:
I'm still hoping that perhaps someday I'll learn to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame.
Admit it: you have also had those thoughts, although you didn't express them to yourself that well.
Now, I know you're looking at titles "Depression Part One" and "Depression Part Two" and feeling reluctant to enter into this kind of heavy weather. You shouldn't. Brosh writes about depression with insight and even manages to make it funny. Yes, Allie Brosh accomplishes the extraordinary feat of making depression funny. And not by sugarcoating it. Brosh writes about depression with what I am required by the cliché enforcers to call "unflinching honesty", except she doesn't. She flinches, a lot, in full view of the camera.
The drawings are weird but expressive. Every chapter is full of insight. Every chapter made me laugh. 1.5H may be the easiest five-star rating I've ever given.