I don’t know why it has taken me so long to read this book. I was a fan of Allie Brosh’s blog before the book was published, which may be part of it? I mean, partly it felt like there wasn’t any urgency because I’d already read a lot of these pieces in blog-post form, and partly it felt like there wasn’t any urgency because I knew the book was going to be amazing, so I was sort of saving it. (Does that make any sense at all? Do you do that with books you’re sure you’re going to love?)
So, right: this book contains eighteen comics in Brosh’s signature style, which is a combination of autobiographical text + color drawings done in Paintbrush (which is like MS Paint—as Brosh puts it in her FAQ, these drawings have “a very precise crudeness”), and they’re pretty much all amazing. I laughed out loud on the train while reading this; when I was at home I flopped on the couch and rolled around while laughing, and read things out loud to my boyfriend even though he read this book before I did. Not that this book is all light reading—some parts of the pieces about depression (part one and part two: these are seriously worth reading) made me teary-eyed, though they have moments of humor, too.
Highlights for me include basically all the parts about Brosh’s dogs (they’re so funny! she draws them so hilariously!), especially the one where she gives “simple dog” an intelligence test. I mean, this comic contains this sentence: “This dog is uncoordinated in a way that would suggest her canine lineage is tainted with traces of a species with a different number of legs—like maybe a starfish or a snake” (20). Remind me again why I took so long to read this in book form?
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