Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Solutions and Other Problems

Reviews tagging 'Mental illness'

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

69 reviews

blueiris315's review

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dark emotional funny sad fast-paced

3.5

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readingpenguin's review

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emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.75

For fans of Hyperbole and a Half comes this better late than never follow up, with seven years of thoughtful and random musings.

Some themes include:

Childhood memories
Mental health
Death and grief
Serious health issues
Starting over and dealing with life changes
Pets and animals

Perhaps not as funny as Brosh's first book, but still worth a read for fans of comic style memoirs and musings. As my list of themes probably reveals, there are some serious and deeply emotional things being grappled with on these pages, and I found those pieces raw, intimate, and touching to read. If that's not your thing, not to worry, plenty of pages also did make me smile and one story in particular had me in stitches. I didn't blow my mind, but I do confidently recommend it anyway.

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lapis's review

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dark emotional funny slow-paced

4.25

1. She explains why there was a 7 year wait for the book.
2. It's sad.
3. It's more than internet detectives on Goodreads thought it was (though I am thankful they didn't know the full story, that would be a disgustingly creepy amount of detail)
4. This is a beautiful book, and there are necessary-to-read chapters like the chapters on depression in her first book.
5. Chapter 17 is the funniest chapter.

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babayagaofficial's review

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emotional funny hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

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ianders's review

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funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

After years of hearing nothing about her, Allie Brosh comes back and blindside me with a new book that is just as funny, relatable and meaningful as the first.

She still has the ability to make me laugh out loud and then cry in the span of a minute and a few pages.

Her illustrated anecdotes still makes dealing with the absurdity of life and existential dread a little less wearying.

Definitely recommend especially to fellow lonesome weirdos who need a reminder that the first friend you gotta make and appreciate is yourself. In spite of everything.

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katethekitcat's review

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dark emotional sad slow-paced

2.75

When considering what to write in this review, I had a lot of thoughts floating around in my head akin to, “a book doesn’t HAVE to funny to be good, you just made a pre-assumption the author is funny,” “it’s not up to you to decide how someone gets to describe their experiences,” etc. Which are both true. But they also obscured the fact that, at the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy Solutions and Other Problems very much.

I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to. Like every other person and their mother on this page right now, I loved the Hyperbole and a Half blog. I still google “allie brosh pain scale” anytime I want to rip out my sides laughing. I enjoyed her first book (didn’t love, but enjoyed). I wondered where she had gone and was thus delighted to see when this emerged from pre-order. In short, I had a lot of stake in the game.

But, although I tried, reading this book just wasn’t fun. First, it isn’t funny. Senses of humor are of course somewhat subjective and I know other reviewers already hard-core disagree with me, but in over 500 pages I chuckled maybe 4 or 5 times and, of the 25 stories, would classify only one (“Cat”) as funny; even then, not to the level of her previous work. Which, on its own, is completely fine. This style of book doesn’t have to be funny. Just because I historically place Allie Brosh’s writing in the “comedy’ bucket doesn’t mean she has to continue that way. Her work can evolve and her style translated to much more series topics.

Except reading these comics didn’t feel like someone who was intentionally using her style to share said serious topics. It felt like someone who was still very much in the middle of being incredible sad and lonely and possibly self-destructive vomited her misery out into this public format in a “HA HA LOOK AT ME ISN’T MY PATHETICNESS FUNNY?” kind of way that left me as a reader deeply cringing. I’m drawn back to her famous comic, Adventures in Depression, where she first shared her struggle with depression. The comic ends leaving the reader thinking she’s ok – but after two years of utter silence, we got part 2, which revealed she had been about to hit rock bottom and hadn’t known it. To me, this book feels like that: like the writer is portraying what are supposed to be funny clever stories, but they’re covering up something much sadder.

I want to clarify that I am absolutely 100% not passing judgment or making assumptions about Allie Brosh or her mental health. Rather, I am describing the sentiment I – the reader – was left with. (Writing this has also made me realize I do think she was trying to be funny; it just didn’t land.)

Structurally, this book didn’t work very well either. Allie has previously commented on her blog FAQ how much time she spends considering story structure, and that she’ll often pull a comic if the underlying skeleton isn’t sufficient. That self-editing didn’t happen here. I particularly recall the story where she talked about a fight she had with her ex-husband, Duncan, that climaxes in a squabble about bananas. I think the story was supposed to be talking about how ridiculous arguments are at the end of the relationship, but the comic itself so completely failed to have a beginning, middle, and end that it instead it just came off as a random series of interactions that (once again) left me cringing and uncomfortable (and not in a reflective way). Quite a few of the comics had that wandering randomness: ok…here are some thoughts and things that happened…moving on to the next one. I found myself skimming the pictures to skip to the text because, in the majority of cases, the pictures didn’t add much to the storytelling. They were just there. The nuance of observation that has previously marked Allie’s work has slipped into the humor of randomness: “ha ha isn’t this arbitrary ha ha.”

Finally (and this is going to sound odd considering how much I’ve been complaining about her book being all dark and unfunny) but at times the book would have benefited from going more into the sad shit happening in her life. She would insert it into comics like she wanted to talk about it, but then it would never come up again. It was that socially awkward moment where someone is just waiting to be asked about Topic X, but no one asks them so instead they keep dropping cryptic hints.

I would not have finished this book if it hadn’t been written by Allie Brosh. If the manuscript had been submitted to a publisher by a complete unknown, I think a good editor would have said, “This is a brilliant idea. Take another year to emotionally process all this content, and then come back and try again.” It breaks my heart, but after reading this I really just hope that Allie has found real-life support and community, that terrible awful things stop happening to her, and also that I don’t ever need to re-read Solutions and Other Problems.

(Three stars because I can’t emotionally put it in the same category as my 2-star books – if nothing else, it’s a huge amount of work and creativity.)

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sionnac's review

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emotional funny sad medium-paced

5.0

I love her. If this was difficult to write/draw because of trauma I can only say there was so much I related to I just want her to be ok. Different than Hyperbole and a Half I felt, so if you loved that you will love this but there is a lot of pain. And I laughed so hard, especially bc I put the awk! in awkward many times. Still do. Thank you Allie.

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rachaelbunny's review

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emotional funny medium-paced

5.0

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malin12ccf's review

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emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring sad medium-paced

5.0

Back in 2013, Allie Brosh published Hyperbole and a Half named after the blog she kept (and has finally updated with a new post!). I pre-ordered the last book and bought it as a Christmas present for pretty much every single person my husband and I knew that year (now our own copy seems to have mysteriously gone missing - which distresses me). Allie's blog (we are clearly on first-name basis, and would be great friends if we ever met) and her book meant a lot to me, frequently made me laugh until I gasped and allowed me to lose many hours on the internet, just reading her older entries. So many of her posts and drawings are now memes.

Then, suddenly, Allie just seemed to vanish entirely from the internet. She stopped updating her blog. Her rumoured second book failed to appear and no one really knew what had happened to her. Because of her honest portrayal of depression and anxiety, there was every possibility that something serious was to blame for her complete disappearance from the web. Until earlier this year, when suddenly this book, Solutions and Other Problems had a cover and a confirmed publishing date and I think I genuinely screamed with joy - because it meant that no matter what else had happened, Allie was alive and had completed another book and was ready to share her thoughts with the world again.

You'd best believe I pre-ordered this the very second I saw the news. I feared that with the usual Covid-delays, my book wouldn't make it here in time for the release day, but I was wrong. Even if this book had been a series of blank pages with the occasional gibberish scrawled on them, I would have happily paid for the book, because I'm so relieved and happy that Allie is OK (in a manner of speaking) and ready to engage with the internet again. She posted one chapter of the new book on her blog. If this doesn't make you laugh like a loon until your stomach hurts, then maybe her way of telling stories isn't for you.

For anyone wondering what happened to Allie, and why she's been gone for so long - it all gets explained in the book. Not everything she writes is laugh-out-loud funny. Like Jenny Lawson, Allie Brosh balances the hilarious and the tragic really well. She was honest about her struggles with depression and mental illness in the last book. When I reviewed her first book back in 2013, I had only the memory of my years of depression back at Uni and during my first years in Edinburgh. Now I'm fighting my way through another fairly major depressive episode and trying to navigate therapy and I feel like some sort of toxic rage monster has taken over my body and is slowly poisoning me and making me unable to control my thoughts and emotions. So this book probably meant even more to me now than Allie's first book did back in 2013.

From what I can gather from my Facebook updates feed, I am not the only one who pre-ordered and has happily consumed this book. For those like-minded people who love Allie and her wonderful way with words (and illustration), she is also updating her Facebook page with pictures, sketches, little videos, and many other things to show her fans more of what she's been up to in the seven years since she last appeared "in public". 2020 has been a very difficult year, this book and Allie Brosh's reappearance feels like a true blessing.

Judging a book by its cover: Oh Allie and your strange little MS Paint style self-portraits, I've missed you so much! Before I read the book, I thought this image was of childhood Allie, but it turns out I was wrong. I don't really want to say anymore so as not to spoil anything.

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