Solutions and Other Problems
Allie Brosh
** spoiler alert **
Breaking Allie
Solutions and Other Problems tells a story. I can't review it without talking about that story, so I have marked this review a spoiler. Here's the story, in outline,
1. Hyperbole and a Half continues.
2. The meteor strikes.
3. Allie struggles to get back on her feet.
The first third of Solutions and parts of the rest are like all of Hyperbole and a Half -- utterly brilliant, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny. I headlined my review of Hyperbole and a Half "Allie Brosh knows your secret thoughts, because they are also Allie Brosh's secret thoughts". How is it that telling the truth is so funny? It doesn't seem that it should be, but it is.
Then the meteor strikes. Not a literal meteor, but other disasters. The first is,
Saying that my health deteriorated would be like describing the sun as large; Technically accurate, but it doesn't really give you a sense of scale.
There were many symptoms. The main one was that I started spontaneously bleeding to death inside my body.
She was told that the illness was likely to be cancer, so for weeks she lived under the belief that she was dying of a terminal disease.
Soon after she learned that she wasn't dying of cancer (it was stage IV endometriosis, apparently a difficult condition to diagnose), this happened:
On New Year's Eve, my little sister drive her car in front of a train.
She died instantly.
Many pages follow in which Allie tries to process her sister's death.
The disasters are not over yet. She and her husband Duncan divorce, and her parents divorce.
The last two chapters, "Friendship Spell" and "Friend" are what I called "Allie struggles to get back on her feet." She writes,
Before mutilating my life like a weaponized rototiller on speed mode, I lived with other creatures.
Specifically, her husband Duncan and two dogs. Since, as she writes, "Duncan was always the main nurturer", the dogs went with him after the divorce. She thus found herself alone for the first time in ten years, and it was not good. The book ends with her attempt to make friends with herself. Chapter 25, the last, reminded me of chapter 11, in which she describes the inevitably totally ineffectual plans of one of her dogs to obtain a snack. Allie's attempts to solve her loneliness problem by making friends with herself seem equally ineffectual. The final chapter is a portrait of a lonely, desperate young woman, and it is hard to read.
She has since, I learn from outside sources, remarried. One presumes, therefore, that she is once again living with other creatures. I hope she finds something approximating happiness and one day returns to bestow her gifts of insight on us.