Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Allie Brosh

Genre:  Humor, Memoir, Cartoon, Graphic Novel

371 pages, published October 29, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Hyperbole and a Half is a graphic novel by Allie Brosh who has a blog by the same name.  In it she provides insightful takes on her nontraditional childhood and challenting adulthood.  She also spends a lot of time analyzing the behavior of her dogs.

Quotes 

“Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. And if I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.”

 

“The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don’t like can be overwhelming.”

 

“Dear 25 year old [note: not “Dear 25-year-old me” or “Dear 25-year-old self,” just “Dear 25 year old”],”

 

“The shelter worker said, “This one hates everything and she doesn’t know anything, and I hope you aren’t planning on taking her outside ever because she’s more like a bear than a dog, really, and unfortunately, she can scale a seven-foot-tall fence like the fucking Spider-Man.” And we were like, “Sure, why not.”

 

“We’re going to play a different game now. It’s called “who can yell ‘help’ the loudest and the most.”

 

“Procrastination has become its own solution – a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success. A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don’t have massive consequences when I neglect to do them.”

 

“Fortunately, it turns out that being scared of yourself is a somewhat effective motivational technique.”

 

“Being a good person is a very important part of my identity, but being a genuinely good person is time-consuming and complicated.”

 

“You don’t have to be a good person to feel like a good person, though. There’s a loophole I found where I don’t do good, helpful things, but I keep myself in a perpetual state of thinking I might.”

 

“I don’t just want to do the right thing. I want to WANT to do the right thing.”

 

“And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something – it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing.”

 

“At first, I’d try to explain that it’s not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anything—even the things you love, even fun things—and you’re horribly bored and lonely, but since you’ve lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you’re stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.”

 

“Nobody can guarantee that it’s going to be okay, but – and I don’t know if this will be comforting to anyone else – the possibility exists that there’s a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you were laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed.”

 

“The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.”

 

“Reality should follow through on what I think it is going to do.”

 

“I cope with it the best way I know – by being completely unreasonable and trying to force everything else in the world to obey me and do all the nonsensical things I want.”

 

“Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life. I’m still hoping that perhaps someday I’ll learn how 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.”

 

“I had tasted cake and there was no going back. My tiny body had morphed into a writhing mass of pure tenacity encased in a layer of desperation. I would eat all of the cake or I would evaporate from the sheer power of my desire to eat it.” 

My Take

I picked up Hyperbole and a Half from the “Librarian Recommendations” shelf at the wonderful Boulder Library.  While I haven’t read many graphic novels, I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  Allie Brosh has a unique and insightful sense of humor that had me laughing out loud at times (to get an idea of it you can check out her blog at http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/.  I especially enjoyed her story about burying a time capsule letter as a child which she addressed to “Dear 25 year old” rather than “Dear 25 year old self” or “Dear 25 year old me,” asked numerous questions about which kinds of dogs she liked and then implored the recipient to “Please write back.”  Her recounting of getting lost in the woods with her mother and her advice to her untrainable dogs also makes for interesting and entertaining reading.