My favorite blog- Hyperbole and a Half

On the topic of blogs for this week, and with an article that discusses the gender differences in blog publishing, I was instantly reminded of my favorite blog: Hyperbole and a Half. It's written by Allie Brosh, who grew up in California, moved to Idaho at age 7, and then attended college at the University of Montana. I stumbled across this blog a few years ago, and have yet to find anything else that holds a candle to the blog's entertainment value for me. Brosh uses a combination of writing and comic sketches in each post to describe different events in her life. Her humor is contagious, and I often find myself referencing her blog in my daily life. She writes about her battles with depression and anxiety as well as lighter topics of her childhood and her pets. Brosh has a HUGE following, and receives hundreds of comments on her posts. She writes in a way that allows you feel like you really know who she is, and at times it feels like she is talking about the same issues her readers struggle with. Brosh became so popular that she wrote a book which was released in 2013, and it has over 100 holds in LINKcat already. Her blog gained critical acclaim in 2011 when PC World rated it as one of the "funniest sites on the web."

Brosh's struggle with depression really affected her fans, who were very vocal about their concerns for her health and well-being. Her "Depression Part II" post received 1.5 million views in a single day. Some experts, including Jonathan Rottenberg, associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, have praised Hyperbole and a Half as one of the best contemporary portraits of the condition. “I know of no better depiction of the guts of what it’s like to be severely depressed: Clutching your blanket, you are born into the baffling, boring, disorienting state that is depression – radically out of phase with the rest of humanity, unable to understand the concerns of other people, nor able to communicate yours to them,” he wrote of Brosh in Psychology Today.

I recommend this blog to ANYONE and EVERYONE! It's hilariously entertaining, but also allows viewers to work through any of their own issues paralleled with Brosh.