Light Review of Amazingly Awesome Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher: Touchstone

Published: 2013

Genre(s): Humour, memoir, comics

Synopsis (WRITTEN BY BROSH, via goodreads.com):  

This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative--like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it--but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:

Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

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Review was just lost to the Internet gods... Will pay a better tribute to tremendously wonderful book when gods are feeling less vengeful...


AS I WAS SAYING! Brosh does an excellent job of balancing depictions of her battles with depression and her relatively lighter trials and tribulations with her two lovably dysfunctional dogs. (With every anecdote I feel better about my 2 little crazy furry monsters....)

Brosh is able to portray the many levels of depression with disturbing accuracy considering the medium (awkward cartooning?) she uses. Pretty sure this is why she was named one of the top 50 most influential creative figures in the world by Advertising Age in 2013!

Also possibly one of the most destructively introspective authors I've ever read, as she looked deep within herself and found that she's basically just a really shitty person (her words!). I would have to disagree, as I don't think a "shitty person" would be so brave to share her journeys not only with the internet, but in book format as well! Humourists like her and Jenny Lawson are blazing the trail of bringing mental illness to the forefront using humour and truthfulness.

A new hero to add to my collection!

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  ~SJ

On Depression:
     "It's disappointing to be sad for no reason. Sadness can almost be pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it. You can listen to sad music and imagine yourself as the protagonist in a dramatic movie. You can gaze out the window while your crying and think, This is so sad. I can't even believe how sad this whole situation is. I bet even a reenactment of my sadness could bring an entire theatre audience to tears.
        But my sadness didn't have a purpose. Listening to sad music and imagining that my life was a movie just made me feel kind of weird because I couldn't really get behind the idea of a movie where the character is sad for no reason (99)."