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Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh.
Jun. 13th, 2019 03:01 pmSubtitle: Unfortunate situations, flawed coping mechanisms, mayhem, and other things that happened.
I read the first sections of this when I first started sharing a house with Charlotte and her book collection three or four years ago, and then two days ago it came up in conversation and I went, "Oh, I forgot about that" and read most of it that evening. It's a graphic novel of memoir anecdotes, half from childhood and half from adulthood: stubbornly looking after almost-untrainable dogs ... the time the goose attacked ... the time when she and her mother got lost in a forest and her mother pretended for seven hours that everything was perfectly under control and they were just playing a pinecone-gathering game...
The book is extremely funny. The art looks as though a child's drawings were possessed by an adult ghost. I've never seen a cartoon avatar be simultaneously so emotionally expressive and so uncanny. Until I got used to it I was wavering back and forth between enjoying it and finding it actively hard to look at, which is probably why I put the book down the first time and didn't pick it up again for years -- reading it made me think of watching The Forest For The Trees, although this book is much, much more hopeful than that film.
The longest segment of the book is a description of falling into and rising out of clinical depression. I think it's one of the better accounts of that I've run across. (I've never been clinically depressed, I have no personal experience to compare it to. But it rings true. Example which I will bear in mind for probable future usefulness: a sequence of panels where the narrator's avatar says 'My fish are dead,' and various cheerful-looking people stand around saying things like, "Let's keep looking! I'm sure they'll turn up somewhere!" and "Fish are always deadest before the dawn," and, "What about bees? Do you like bees?")
Some more of my reaction to this book is my reaction to the idea of having a mind which might cease to respond to conventional positive motivation, and the extent to which I'm afraid of my mind's mild existing tendency to do that; but that is being too complicated to write about when I need to get back to revising and am already a book behind. (The Parable of the Sower is wonderful and I hereby ban myself from writing about it before my exam. And to be complete, I have also just reread Paladin of Souls for the first time, and don't intend to write more about it than: a very good book to accompany essay-writing).
Allie Brosh's blog, which the book is partly drawn from, is here: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/
And lest I have underemphasised them: dogs. There are dogs to be found in this book.
I read the first sections of this when I first started sharing a house with Charlotte and her book collection three or four years ago, and then two days ago it came up in conversation and I went, "Oh, I forgot about that" and read most of it that evening. It's a graphic novel of memoir anecdotes, half from childhood and half from adulthood: stubbornly looking after almost-untrainable dogs ... the time the goose attacked ... the time when she and her mother got lost in a forest and her mother pretended for seven hours that everything was perfectly under control and they were just playing a pinecone-gathering game...
The book is extremely funny. The art looks as though a child's drawings were possessed by an adult ghost. I've never seen a cartoon avatar be simultaneously so emotionally expressive and so uncanny. Until I got used to it I was wavering back and forth between enjoying it and finding it actively hard to look at, which is probably why I put the book down the first time and didn't pick it up again for years -- reading it made me think of watching The Forest For The Trees, although this book is much, much more hopeful than that film.
The longest segment of the book is a description of falling into and rising out of clinical depression. I think it's one of the better accounts of that I've run across. (I've never been clinically depressed, I have no personal experience to compare it to. But it rings true. Example which I will bear in mind for probable future usefulness: a sequence of panels where the narrator's avatar says 'My fish are dead,' and various cheerful-looking people stand around saying things like, "Let's keep looking! I'm sure they'll turn up somewhere!" and "Fish are always deadest before the dawn," and, "What about bees? Do you like bees?")
Some more of my reaction to this book is my reaction to the idea of having a mind which might cease to respond to conventional positive motivation, and the extent to which I'm afraid of my mind's mild existing tendency to do that; but that is being too complicated to write about when I need to get back to revising and am already a book behind. (The Parable of the Sower is wonderful and I hereby ban myself from writing about it before my exam. And to be complete, I have also just reread Paladin of Souls for the first time, and don't intend to write more about it than: a very good book to accompany essay-writing).
Allie Brosh's blog, which the book is partly drawn from, is here: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/
And lest I have underemphasised them: dogs. There are dogs to be found in this book.
