Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

I've been wanting to read the book of Hyperbole and a Half for a while. I'd read some of what appears between these pages on her blog, and have always enjoyed them. So I knew that eventually I'd get around to a collection of the old favourites and probably some that I've never seen before, but wasn't sure when. Then my sister pulled it off her shelf and told me to borrow it, in the days immediately after our mother's death. She figured it might be a good diversion.

It took me a while to sit down with this book, for no particular reason, but I finally did. It was, of course, a quick read - I tend to buzz through books with pictures, as much as I think that I should slow down and linger over the illustrations - although with Brosh's drawings, there's not a lot of intricate background detail I'm missing.

Indeed, the roughness is part of the appeal - as she herself appears in her drawings, she's more a child's abstract human than a real one, and yet capable of conveying great amounts of emotions. It's fascinating.

My favourite one (other than the iconic "Clean All The Things!") is the Cake series. I laughed myself silly the first time I read it - the look of absolute determination to die of sugar overload. The vindictiveness when she did get the cake. The way she captures in words and images those moment when a child decides an adult is the enemy.  It just kills me. It perhaps didn't make me laugh as hard as the first time I read it, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly.

There were others I already knew and liked, including the pair of stories about depression that were difficult and powerful explorations of that experience. (Or at least, they seemed that way to me, who has only ever experienced it from the outside.)

And then there were new ones, about the helper dogs, and how both her dogs think (or fail to do so) or letters to herself at various ages, or her mother taking them out for a walk in the woods and trying to hide that they were very, very lost. Brosh as a child misunderstanding what her parents wanted and needed and thus tormenting them more or less accidentally is a common theme.

So is self-judgement, with a couple of stories about how her mind works and resenting the world when it doesn't behave in the manner she unconsciously assumed it should, as well about wanting to be a good person when she has thoughts of doing things that are not so good, and how fear of social judgement is pretty much the only thing that keeps her from doing them. It feels like she's a little hard on herself for having thoughts at all in these sections, but it also feels quite vivid and real, the battle between wanting, thinking, and doing.

As I fully expected, this book was entertaining, and it was not a surprise that I'd probably read between a third and a half of it before on the internet. I certainly don't begrudge her that! Most particularly, it was a welcome break from the general difficulty of the world right now.