You don’t think of The Shining as a movie that you’d identify with, but I feel like I really identify with it now. MJ: What was it like to switch from blogging to book writing?ĪB: I spent long hours shut in my room with nothing but my own thoughts and thinking about trying to be funny, and you go a little bit insane. I have notebooks filled with stuff that I would write before, but I never showed it to anybody. I’ve always enjoyed writing things, just as a means of entertaining myself. I was procrastinating on studying for a physics final and I wondered if I could write something that people would like. Mother Jones: Had you ever blogged before starting Hyperbole and a Half?Īllie Brosh: I had some silly thing on MySpace ages ago, but that’s about the extent of it. “It’s hard to know whether what I’m doing is something worth posting.” “When I’m really, really depressed, I just don’t find myself funny at all,” she explains. (It received 1.5 million visits in a single day.) She was surprised to learn that her fans-thousands weighed in with supportive comments-had worried about her so much during her absence. “Trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back,” she wrote.Īfter revealing details of her depression to readers in October 2011, Brosh went AWOL for a year and a half, re-emerging this past May to post a painfully honest chronicle of her downward spiral and contemplation of suicide. But it was the darkly humorous accounts of her battles with severe depression that resonated most. Her childhood tales, such as the time she attended her friend’s birthday party heavily sedated, are among her most popular posts. “If things in the world actually looked like they did when I drew them, we would live in a terrifying place,” she jokes of her early creations.

Her mom offered pens and rolls of butcher paper. Living in the sticks 10 miles from town, Brosh was forced to entertain herself. “I was sort of a wild animal, forest child.”

“I would get up at six o’clock in the morning and walk around the forest and try to find deer,” she says. Her small-town upbringing-first in Auburn, California later near Sandpoint, Idaho-gave her space to “be a little bit weirder” growing up. The book deal was a longtime dream: Brosh had resolved to become an author at age eight, filling three spiral-bound notebooks with a saga about a guy who fights various things.

Hyperbole and a half book