Like many of the books in our series on humor, Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half is so specifically temporally located that a less generous person, or even my younger college-aged students, might call it "dated." There is something about the freneticism, vulnerability, and seeming universality of "adulting," to crib a similarly dated phrase, that calls to mind BuzzFeed quizzes, Onion horoscopes, and the early days of YouTube virality.
Admittedly, growing up in southwest Kansas does not typically offer one the internet literacy necessary to easily unpack memes or get comfortable in those creative communities that offered refuge to outsiders in message board spaces where niche internet cultures flourished and marginalized voices found digital enclaves of understanding and creativity. As a result, I missed the first go-around with Allie Brosh's wildly popular webcomic turned graphic novel, Hyperbole and a Half, but my wife, who was not raised in this rural Dickensian countryside, was well-versed enough in Brosh's original webcomic to provide me with some insights.
My wife Kelsey recalls, "I associate Hyperbole and a Half with my Tumblr days, endlessly scrolling on a top bunk in a shared dorm in college. Tumblr, Blogspot, and similar sites were in reflection an early “for you page” — quickly adopted at my university by nerdy students and cool kids peddling their aesthetics. Hyperbole and a Half, on some spectrum of The Oatmeal, was hilarious to me at the time. Scribbled in Microsoft Paint, the erratic, sarcastic, earnest ramblings of Allie Brosh made me feel emboldened to embrace my own chaos. The “Adventures in Depression” post after a break from posting in October 2011 (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html?m=1) stopped me in my tracks. Brosh shed a light on the absurdity one often feels regarding their own mental health struggles and made me feel less alone. For however better or worse this book ages in the annals of Millennial Cringe, I smiled when Matt mentioned he was reading this book for this book club.”
Like all of our books, there is a bit of Brosh's narrative that contains an element of time travel. Outside of her letters to her younger self that frame the early narrative, the entirety of the book is also a sort of letter to ourselves– our more vulnerable, creative, and occasionally beautiful selves, specifically ourselves as they existed in the 2010s, not quite ready to touch grass.
