I also knew that the people reading it would probably feel some doubt to its veracity.”

This is despite photographs documenting the event, which she included because she says “While all of this was happening, I knew that it was probably going to be a story I’d write down someday. On the page, even with the adorably sad-faced shark that she uses as her alter ego, it is less so. In the heat of the moment, a goose walking into the house, running and chasing the inhabitants, probably makes for a bit some excitement. “Dinosaur (the Goose Story)” is a prime example. Maybe it was funny, but you probably had to be there to really appreciate it. The other half is made up of new pieces that come off like a co-worker retelling jokes heard the night before at a comedy show. Half of the book is composed of the most popular blog posts, such as “The God of Cake”-still hilarious after numerous readings-in which Brosh acts a stone-cold fool while scheming to eat her grandmother’s birthday cake, and “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” where her anxious canines vomit, cry, and crawl their way into a new house. In two blog entries written in May and October 2011, respectively, she addressed her book deal and gave a sobering explanation of her ongoing experiences with depression. Guess what funny thing just happened? LOL! Brosh isn’t always so banal. The popularity of the memoir format combined with a cultural insistence on elevating the banal into the sublime often leaves the reader unfulfilled and only mildly interested, as though they just skimmed a series of lunchtime Google chats. In her blog-based book, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened, Brosh creates a diagram by which her attempts to increase the level of responsibility in her life ultimately end in a “system failure.” Despite some amusingly re-created anecdotes, this book tries to do “all the things” with uneven results. She seemed to have a following among the Dewey Decimal-literate (or anyone in graduate school) because her concept of “doing all the things” as a mantle of adult responsibility was painfully familiar.

The illustrations, rendered in a throwback Mac application, were wry and occasionally burst-out-laughing funny.

I was first introduced to blogger Allie Brosh’s “Hyperbole and a Half” when I started library school.

Hyperbole and a half author