A review by katethekitcat
Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

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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