Sometimes, being an adult just means being a larger version of the tiny little monsters we were when we were children. In Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half, the book-length collection of Brosh's popular mid-aughts webcomic and blog, readers encounter the familiar struggles of getting up in the morning, compulsive behaviors, and everyday absurdities. The introduction of Brosh's collection centers around a time capsule project, where the little weirdo of Brosh's past pens letters to her future self, and future Brosh pens letters back to her many-aged little weirdo iterations, advising her younger self that "Face cream is not edible–no matter how much it looks like frosting, no matter how many times you try it–it's always going to be face cream and it's never going to be frosting." She similarly asks herself to stop eating ludicrous amounts of salt and trying to counteract the effects with similarly ludicrous amounts of pepper. And finally, in her last culinarily related bit of hindsight, that "no one is going to love you until you stop doing things like trying to make them love you by eating mustard sand." The struggle for young Brosh is singular and unique, but if you think you don't have twenty similarly weird, if not weirder, iterations of your younger self, I question your honesty.
And it's precisely Brosh's honesty, her willingness to explore the roots of some of the more uncomfortable elements of her existence, and her reveling in the freedom and perversity of abject candor that creates the humor of this collection. Beyond this relatability and applaudable self-examination, what makes this collection stand out from the other texts in this spring book club is the relatively simple distinction that it’s quite often funny!
At one particularly humorous point, Brosh and her boyfriend are victims of a violent home invasion–one perpetrated by a goose. Terrorized by the goose, who assaults Brosh's boyfriend, takes up residence in their kitchen, and causes both Brosh and her boyfriend to consider moving or accepting a tenuous shared living arrangement with the goose who has begun to mark its possessions by pecking items in its seemingly new home, Brosh decides that the goose's claim on her DVD player is a step too far, and that "Geese have no business owning DVD players. It was entirely unacceptable." In this one story, we find the charm, and scattered brilliance of Brosh's narrative, we follow her logic, we empathize with the easy choice of capitulating to the goose, and we too find a goose's ownership of a DVD player "entirely unacceptable." The story is ridiculous, it's inconvenient, but it takes the conscious choice of action over inaction to escape the prospect of cohabitating with a waterfowl.
It's precisely this tension between necessitated change when life becomes untenable and radical acceptance of those elements of our personality that make life if not enjoyable, then at least interesting, that underscores all of the stories in Hyperbole and a Half. This book embraces the weird, the uncomfortable, the borderline unbearable, and still, I found myself coming away laughing more often than not.
