Review: Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

Allie Brosh has been through a lot in the years since she sent her debut Hyperbole and a Half to the publisher. Her younger sister passed away after being hit by a train, she developed a case of endometriosis so severe that doctors initially thought that she had cancer, she has been through a divorce and various relocations to different cities and states. And then there are her continuing struggles with mental health. Anyway, so many events have taken their toll on Brosh and it shows in her writing and cute but crudely drawn pictures that depicts herself as something of a cross between a stick figure and a fish. In this second volume, it becomes clear that Brosh is of the opinion that life is hard and well, pretty much pointless. And somehow, despite this, Brosh still manages to leverage her greatest talent--her insight into human nature--and turn it into a volume that is unique, surprisingly raw and entertaining.

Brosh's drawings are as crude and clever as ever. There are some childhood memories included in here, such as the time her three year old self became fascinated with their neighbour, poor unsuspecting Richard. The stories of her adult life are harder and crueller and many of them end very abruptly, as if to remind readers that she feels there is no point to all of this. And that gets tiring after a while. 

Solutions and Other Problems is an insightful and compelling as it is irritating. While Brosh can depict small parts of every day life just as cleverly as she gives insight into grief and to living with a mental illness, parts of this volume feel as though she is holding something back and is not allowing herself to flesh out the stories as fully as she is capable of. The volume is far darker than Hyperbole and a Half, which had darker moments that were balanced out with the pictures and some of the stories taking on a childlike quality.

That said, I am not sorry I read this one--parts of it are quite entertaining, such as Brosh writing about her encounter with a pesky neighbourhood child while she is stoned out of her mind. And the whole concept still feels very original and unique to the author. And while I enjoyed it, I hope for the author's sake that she is not pressured into writing a third volume, and that if such a book ever emerges it is because it is something that she wants to do, and because she has something that she wants to say.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more