She found fame and community on the internet creating stories that explained what it felt like to be depressed, evoking the disconnect between interior feeling and exterior behavior through the interplay of words and images. One of Brosh’s central subjects was - and still is - depression. She appears, at all ages, as a small creature with stick arms, a bright pink dress and a yellow ponytail.

And often structurally ingenious: “Warning Signs,” a piece about digging up, in the backyard, a letter she wrote to her future self when she was 10, is addressed to other versions of her past self. Then there was her muscular storytelling, which, like her drawing, was economical and effective, hitting just the right beats, both funny and dark, introspective and observant. (I even bought the calendar.) A selection of Brosh’s autobiographical word-and-image stories from her blog of the same name (which she began in college while procrastinating for a final), “Hyperbole and a Half” made me laugh harder than anything I could remember.įirst there was her drawing style: a charming, stripped-down visual vocabulary accomplished entirely in the free software program Paintbrush, in which faces - of effervescently manic children, bewildered staring parents and various dogs - took center stage as vehicles of expression. I came late to Allie Brosh’s “Hyperbole and a Half” - later than the outspoken fan Bill Gates and numerous enthusiastic writers for Psychology Today - but when I fell, I fell hard.

Allie hyperbole and a half