Hyperbole and a Half is back and it’s the bright spot we needed in 2020

By Christina Roberts | Oct 6, 2020

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh. Image courtesy Simon & Schuster /

Hyperbole and a Half was a niche internet staple almost a decade ago. After a seven-year hiatus, Allie Brosh returns with a new book and hilarious stories.

If you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet, you’ve probably run into some iteration of Hyperbole and a Half. Maybe you’ve seen the Alot in a comments section. Or the “all the things” meme.

And if you’re an older Millennial, you probably spent countless nights refreshing Allie Brosh’s zany blog just to see if there were new drawings or a new story posted. Back in the heyday of 2009/2010, you could expect multiple updates a week, sometimes more than once a day. Her two posts about depression have been cited as a great depiction and have helped many people understand it better.

Of course, life gets in the way of most things, and Hyperbole and a Half’s last update was in October of 2013 — right around when Brosh’s first book was published.

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Until this past September, that is, when Brosh officially announced the release of her second book, Solutions and Other Problems, which hit shelves on September 22. Honestly, it’s such a refreshing thing to read, especially given everything else that’s come before it in 2020.

It feels like coming home to something warm and familiar, as cheesy as that sounds. The pictures are still ridiculous and a little crude, but you can tell technology’s gotten better in the last seven years and there’s a preciseness to them. The stories are about as crazy as you’d expect.

Brosh doesn’t delve too deeply into what happened over the last seven years, although Chapter 10 is the heaviest chapter of the book, delving into the death of her sister. If you’ve lost anyone in your life, the pages upon pages of drawn memories with no words will bring tears to your eyes at a minimum. It’s then followed up with a hilarious story about “pile dog.”

Since the release of Solutions and Other Problems, Brosh has popped up in interviews with NPR and Buzzfeed, and it’s a relief to see her back in the public eye, at least for a few minutes.

Likewise, we also got an update to her blog with a chapter from her book, simply titled “Richard.” It’s a delight. And it’s just genuinely nice to see an update.

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If you’ve never encountered Hyperbole and a Half, take a quick look through the site. Click on some of the “Best of” posts on the side (my go-to on a bad day is “The Party”) and just enjoy when things were a little simpler on the internet.