One of Your Favorite Humor Blogs Is a Book!

Do you have a touch of prejudice when it comes to books adapted from blogs? Fair enough. Not everything from the Internet was meant to make the jump to paper. Sometimes you get the feeling a publisher just wanted to make a quick buck off a website before its 15 minutes of fame expired. With Hyperbole and a Half, the new book based on her site of the same name, Allie Brosh defies the stigma that can plague blog-books by throwing sharp writing, exuberant humor, and keen observations at it with all her might—then scribbling some quirky pictures on it for good measure.
Just in case you’re still hesitating, let’s tackle a few blog-book myths right now.
1. A “blogger” isn’t the same as an “author.” OK, sometimes that’s true. You never know what cyberspace is going to serve up. But in this case, your inner sentence-snob need not fear; Brosh is a natural writer with an eye for clean, concise syntax and an ear for the rhythms of speech and language. As always, her anecdotes move along at an entertaining clip, so her storytelling format works just as well on the page as it does online, where hundreds of thousands of readers follow her every post.
2. But these stories aren’t about anything. Yes and no. Part essay, part comic, each chapter is simply an extraordinary telling of ordinary things: going for a hike and getting lost, hiding from a stray goose that wanders into the house, playing with a talking toy parrot. Why would you pay money to read stories about a non-famous person doing non-amazing things? Because the way Allie Brosh tells stories is so damn funny. I particularly love the deadpan observations on her own childhood behavior, as in this excerpt from a letter she writes to her 4-year-old self about a nasty salt-eating habit: “As soon as you became aware that eating huge amounts of salt is really, really uncomfortably salty, you should have stopped eating salt. That’s the solution. The solution is not to begin eating pepper to cancel out the salt.”
3. Bloggers are navel-gazing narcissists. Well, some are. But this is self-reflection of the best possible kind. Yes, Brosh knows her stories are funny—or she wouldn’t be telling them—but she also knows that she, like all humans, is a bit of an idiot, which makes her come across as an underdog. I root for her when she reveals her own vulnerabilities and self-defeating tendencies (likely because they’re behaviors I recognize in myself). Often, her honesty brings to mind the wonderful/awful admissions of fellow essayist David Sedaris. For example: “On a fundamental level, I am someone who would throw sand at children. I know this because I have had to resist doing it, and that means that it’s what I would naturally be doing if I wasn’t resisting it.”
4. Comics? Not for me. The drawings that accompany Brosh’s essays may seem simple and goofy at first glance. But with their big eyes and herky-jerky gestures, her figures convey joy, confusion, shame, outrage, and mischief in a way that’s deeply expressive and hysterically complementary to her words. (In a chapter where Brosh frets about her bizarre inner monologues, there’s a little picture of herself with the thought-bubble, “I wonder what would happen if I bit that guy’s dog?”  followed by, “Jesus Christ, why am I like this?” The expression on her character’s face is just plain priceless.)
5. I’ve seen it all online. Wrong. The bulk of this book is comprised of 11 new chapters never before seen on the blog, including a two-parter called “Identity” that navigates dark emotional territory hilariously, not unlike Brosh’s now-famous post on depression, which was written up on Psychology Today and called “stunningly brilliant” by Business Insider  (and is included in the book). Die-hard Hyperbole fans will be thrilled to see 7 past favorites, some of which feature new drawings. Yes, the format stays the same as it does on the blog—the absurd and the profound mix together into short, easy-to-read pieces—but the material is largely new.
This book isn’t for everyone. If you hate laughing, it’s not for you. If you would describe yourself as “perfectly normal” and “not weird at all,” it’s not for you. If you prefer your humor in the form of straight-up knock-knock jokes, it’s not for you. But I’ll tell you this: Reading the book on a flight, I found myself snort-laughing so hard that an attendant stopped to ask if I needed assistance. That’s the same way I react to the blog when I’m at home, drinking my coffee in front of my computer, wondering at my luck at getting such fantastic entertainment for free. As far as I’m concerned, that means the screen-to-page transition was done right. I’m happy to pay for that.
What other blogs you love have successfully been turned into books?