Allie Brosh is sipping an IPA and taking the occasional bite of a cheeseburger as she gives a detailed treatise as to why she’ll never be a real, actual adult, even though she’s 25 years old. She says the pressures of real-world responsibilities like grocery shopping and replying to e-mail eventually give her reason to rebel, setting aside important tasks in favor of Internet surfing for days at a time. But if you read Brosh’s outrageously popular blog, Hyperbole and a Half, you probably already knew this because she outlined it in one of her posts, complete with a diagram and the purposely goofy paintbrush illustrations that have become the hallmark of her style.
Then, mostly out of nowhere, Brosh holds up her slender left hand and says, “Did I tell you we got engaged?”
Her fiancé, Duncan, grins as the two tell the story of their engagement a few nights prior at a restaurant in Bend. That story – which is so appallingly romantic that to repeat it here would shame men everywhere – probably won’t make it onto the blog, but pretty much everything else about Brosh is up there, including the time she shaved her head (and then won a dog show) and the time she tried to run in an NCAA track meet with a 104-degree fever and subsequently passed out… then somehow ended up in a Spanish-only grocery store. She even wrote a post about how much she hated moving boxes with her “T-rex arms” when she and Duncan moved to Bend this fall.
Last April, Hyperbole and a Half’s popularity exploded, surging from 700 hits a day to now raking in more than half a million daily visitors. Now, Allie is, as she says “Internet famous,” and what began as a blog to dispense the daily absurdity that is her life is now turning into a career that could lead to opportunities far beyond the Internet. She’s thinking about writing a book or maybe heading into stand-up comedy, but says nothing’s for sure. The jump in Hyperbole and a Half’s popularity came after the blog was highlighted on the social news site, Reddit, expanding Brosh’s audience from her circle of friends and a few loyal fans to millions of regular readers.
“People would leave a couple of comments and I remember I was really excited when I had eight comments. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, eight whole people are reading what I’m writing,'” says Brosh.
Brosh’s posts are all accompanied by the seemingly amateur – yet calculatedly so – graphics, which always depict her as a childlike stick figure in a pink dress. She also draws an excellent unicorn.
“I know it looks crude, but it’s a very purposeful crudeness. Sometimes I’ll redraw something 10 times,” she says.
Brosh grew up outside of the small north Idaho town of Sandpoint in the even smaller town of Sagle with parents who dissuaded her from watching television or playing video games, leaving her to entertain herself in the surrounding forests and mountains – something she rarely struggled with thanks to her rampant ADD (“I was a demon child,” she recalls). Thanks to the outrageous circumstances she’d end up in as a child – and still, to a lesser degree, as an adult – Brosh is never at a loss for material.
“I had all this whole forest available to me and no passive entertainment to distract me and a boatload of impulsivity, so I would get myself into all of these situations with really no forethought,” she says.
A runner in high school, Brosh earned a scholarship to run track and cross country at the University of Montana, where she bounced between majors, eventually settling on biology while also finding athletic success. She ran in the NCAA cross country national championships and also competed against some of the country’s most elite distance runners during the track and field season. When she and Duncan (who was also an accomplished runner at Montana) were offered jobs at a lab in the tiny Montana town of Hamilton after graduating in 2009, Brosh realized she wasn’t done running and turned down the gig. While Duncan worked in the lab researching leukemia, Brosh was running races and living off the winnings – until she injured her Achilles tendon. Living in Hamilton and unable to run, Brosh devoted more time to writing the ridiculous stories with which she’d been regaling Facebook friends, eventually leading to the creation of Hyperbole and a Half.
She spent much of last winter hammering away on posts, but not seeing much return while the couple lived humbly, to say the least.
“We couldn’t even afford heat. We had our living room cordoned off with blankets and had a space heater and at one point we had an inch of ice on our bedroom window,” says Brosh.
When she talks about that winter – a situation that might cause some to sigh sympathetically – she’s upbeat. She laughs as she recalls being “burritoed up in blankets” on the couch working on blog posts and smiles as she tells the story because, as far as I can tell, the petite and bubbly young woman is a master of making light of life’s speed bumps. And that’s what has made her blog so successful; the fact that she’s writing cerebral and comically advanced commentaries on her own life and contemporary society, but without a shred of cynicism.
At any given time, Brosh has a story to rival anything anyone else in the room might be able to provide, but she tells these weird, yet always hilarious, tales matter-of-factly – like others might recall their day at the office. She wants people to listen when she, for example, recalls drifting for hours in an out-of-gas boat with high-school friends before rowing to shore and being “rescued” by meth heads, but she asks a lot of questions about other people. She’s a storyteller, but she also makes you want to tell stories, even if you’ve never, like her, owned a mentally challenged dog or shaved your head to impress a boy.
But her most engaging story is how a 25 year old suddenly became one of the Internet’s most buzzed-about comedy bloggers in a matter of six months, even if she’s slightly reluctant about getting all the attention.
“I’ve never wanted to be in the spotlight or anything. That’s the one thing I’ve appreciated about my work just being online,” says Brosh. “It’s pretty anonymous. I’ve never been recognized out in public and I like that separation.”
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2010.
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I haven’t seen the blog and I intend to check it out, but on the basis of reading this story and seeing the pictures, I’m thinking it’ll be way too heavy a dose of perky for me to handle.
I can think of at least ten (eleven if we count me) local bloggers who have put six and seven years in the trenches without a perky little shout-out from The Source. Com’on guys, I realize I’m a toothless ugly Old Logger dissing both the left and the right with equal aplomb (translation for Source Trolls – I have as little good to say about hippies as I do reichwing paranoid freaks) but perky little face, perky little butt, perky little dogs… couldn’t you have found someone a little closer to home?
Ahhh, HBM… I’ve visited there several times before she moved and 1) her blog posts are way to long for “perky” and 2) I’ve a little bet with myself, care to join… how long before she too is forced by the bend.com source trolls to turn off comments?
I looked at the blog and read the first item — not too perky at all, and really very funny, especially the drawings. She’s got a lot of talent. I plan to become a regular reader.
“how long before she too is forced by the bend.com source trolls to turn off comments?”
That would be a shame, but you’re probably right.
Oh, c’mon Thomas. Do you get a half a million daily visitors? Call back when you do.
Thomas – have dignity, just cos you blog, it doesn’t mean your blog is the best. Allie’s blog is hilarious. As someone who gets themselves into equally stupid situations, I love reading her stories.
Just because she is young, it doesn’t mean her blog is not worthy. And, at the end of the day, most internet users are young people, who just want to read something fun (preferably with pictures), than read political ramblings of a middle aged man. I’m not speaking for myself, but, it’s just how the net works. Look at Digg it.
read this link and tell me she’s not one of the best!
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-fish-almost-destroyed-my-childhood.html
Where anyone would read the above article and get “perky” is beyond me. I don’t think anyone who goes without heat for a brutal winter would be described as perky, even on a good day.
It is possible to make a point with humorous insight, which Allie does quite well. Not everything needs to be sturm und drang… or dissing. And at the end of the day, let’s face it, a good laugh is more powerful than a snarky diss, any day.
“And, at the end of the day, most internet users are young people, who just want to read something fun (preferably with pictures)”
I preferred that kind of reading myself … when I was 6 years old.
wow, jealousy much, bloggers? Allie’s blog is fantastic, if you think reading something that has pictures in it is for kids then, fine, don’t read it…there are still a lot of intelligent, well read people out there who don’t go on the internet to find something deep and insightful, but who simply want to have a laugh. And allie’s drawings and stories make me and ALOT of people laugh.
At the end of the day, she is internet famous and you are not, so suck on that.
Hey, I hope you’re not referring to me. I love her blog.
Who gives a shit. She has her moments from the few posts I read. Not a fan. But to those who are, that’s fine. There are millions upon millions of Family Guy fans. I think it’s just not all that funny or extraordinary. To each their own.
Nice article about my daughter!
You go, Mama Brosh! Your daughter’s blog is incredible and we, her readers, thank you for raising such a talented and bright young woman!