Olivia: Alright Jackson, I'm going to say the title of a book, and you have to give me your most honest, gut-reaction roast of what it sounds like. Ready? Solutions and Other Problems. Jackson: Solutions and Other Problems. Sounds like a self-help book written by an IKEA instruction manual. "Step 1: Assemble your life. Step 2: Realize you have three screws left over and your life is now wobbly forever." Olivia: That's... shockingly accurate, actually. Today we’re diving into Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh. And for anyone who doesn't know her, Brosh is the genius behind the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half. She's famous for these intentionally crude, hilarious drawings she makes in MS Paint, but she uses them to talk about incredibly deep things, like her own severe depression and ADHD. Jackson: Wait, MS Paint? The program we all used in the 90s to make squiggly lines? That’s her medium for discussing depression? I’m already intrigued. Olivia: Exactly. It’s that mix of high-brow pain and low-brow art that makes her work so unique. This book was highly anticipated, coming years after her first bestseller, and it was written in the wake of some immense personal tragedy she went through, which we'll get to. But it starts, as she always does, with the absurd. Jackson: I feel like we need to start there too. Where does this journey into wobbliness begin? Olivia: It begins with a perfect, tiny story that captures her entire worldview. She’s driving on the highway and sees a single party balloon, tied to the back of a truck, going 90 miles per hour.

Jackson: Oh, I think I know that feeling. A little burst of color and joy in a situation it was absolutely not designed for. Olivia: Precisely. She describes it "wobbling all around in spastic little circles," making this frantic 'wp-wp-wp-wp' sound. It’s so utterly out of place, so chaotic, that she starts laughing uncontrollably, so hard she has to pull over to the side of the road. Jackson: That’s a pretty extreme reaction to a balloon. Olivia: It is, but then she delivers the line that sets the stage for the entire book. After her laughter dies down, she just sits there and thinks, "I feel just like that balloon." Jackson: Wow. Okay. Powerless, dragged along at high speed, and making a weird flapping noise while trying to keep up. I think we've all been that balloon at some point. Olivia: That’s the core of the first part of the book. It’s a collection of stories about fighting for control in a world that offers you none. My favorite is the chapter called "Bucket," where as a three-year-old, she becomes obsessed with fitting her entire body inside her dad's car-washing bucket. Jackson: As one does. This sounds like a classic toddler-versus-physics showdown. Who wins? Olivia: Well, physics wins, repeatedly. She gets stuck. Not just once. She describes this escalating, secret war with the bucket. She'd sneak into the garage to try again and again, convinced she could dominate it. Her parents would find her wedged in there, screaming, and have to pull her out. Jackson: This happened multiple times? Olivia: She says the only thing worse than getting trapped in the same bucket nineteen times is surrender. Jackson: Nineteen times! I don't know, surrender sounds pretty good after, say, the fifth time. What is this obsession with fighting pointless battles? Olivia: That’s the question she’s asking! Why do we insist on trying to control these small, absurd things? The bucket, the bananas in a grocery store argument she has with her ex-husband, the "Poop Mystery" where horse poop keeps appearing in the house and the family descends into paranoia. She finds the humor in our desperate, and usually failed, attempts to impose order on a chaotic world. Jackson: It’s like she’s a scientist of absurdity, documenting all the ways life refuses to make sense. The evidence is a bucket, a balloon, and mysterious poop. Olivia: Exactly. And for about half the book, you're laughing along with her. It’s brilliant, it’s relatable, and it feels like you're just reading a collection of hilarious, quirky essays. But then, you turn a page, and the book changes completely. Jackson: Okay, so we have balloons, buckets, poop mysteries... it's all very funny and absurd. But you mentioned this book gets serious. How does she make that turn?

Olivia: She does it with a chapter that’s just a title page. It says, "The Serious Part." And then, the laughter stops. The tone shifts so abruptly it gives you whiplash. Jackson: What happens in "The Serious Part"? Olivia: She lays out, in stark, unflinching detail, a period of her life where everything fell apart. She developed a severe, mysterious illness that caused spontaneous internal bleeding. Doctors couldn't figure it out. She was in and out of emergency rooms. Eventually, they found multiple large tumors and she had to have major surgery, all while being told it was very likely cancer. Jackson: That is incredibly heavy. And this is right after stories about a dog who is a "criminal mastermind"? Olivia: Right after. And it gets worse. Shortly after her surgery, while she's recovering, her younger sister dies by suicide. Jackson: Oh, wow. That's... a heavy turn. To go from laughing at a dog to that. It feels like she's refusing to give the reader any emotional comfort. Olivia: That's the point. That's what grief is. It doesn't arrive politely. It crashes into your life while you're in the middle of other things. Critics and readers have called this part of the book a "heroic effort." It's so raw and honest about the ugliness of trauma. She writes, "I’ll never get to say sorry. And I’ll never know why. And that feels … really bad." There's no poetry to it. It's just a flat, horrible truth. Jackson: How does this connect back to the humor? Does the humor just... stop? Olivia: It doesn't stop, but it becomes a tool for exploring the tragedy. The most powerful example of this is the "Fish Video" chapter. After her sister's funeral, she watches an old home video. In it, she's two years old, on a beach, and she's found a dead sardine. Jackson: Okay, I'm already nervous about where this is going. Olivia: The toddler version of her doesn't understand death. She thinks the fish is just a friend who needs help. So she tries everything. She blows on it. She yells encouragement at it. She sings to it. She even gives it a vigorous massage, and she's so earnest, but the fish just keeps falling apart in her hands. Jackson: That's heartbreaking. Olivia: As a child, it was just a weird, funny home video. But as an adult watching it after her sister's death, she says she found it "devastatingly relatable." It becomes this perfect, unintentional metaphor for her grief—this futile, desperate attempt to bring something back to life, to fix something that is irrevocably broken, not understanding that all your effort is pointless. Jackson: So the absurdity she found funny in the balloon story becomes the source of tragedy in the fish story. It's the same theme—powerlessness—but seen through two completely different lenses. Olivia: Exactly. And that's the question that hangs over the rest of the book: after you've faced the absolute worst, the most senseless loss, how do you even begin to look for solutions?

Olivia: That's the brilliant part. After the tragedy, she starts searching for 'solutions,' but they're the most Allie Brosh solutions imaginable. They are just as bizarre and absurd as the problems. For example, she finds herself living alone for the first time in a decade and is hit with a profound, crushing loneliness. Jackson: Which is a very real, very painful problem. What's her unconventional solution? Olivia: She decides the most practical thing to do is to befriend herself. Jackson: Befriend... herself? Okay, but 'befriending yourself' sounds a little... out there. How does she actually make that work? It sounds like something you'd see on a cheesy motivational poster. Olivia: She treats it like a real, awkward process. She says you have to treat yourself like a new, weird friend you're trying to get to know. You might not like them at first. You might think their hobbies are stupid. She writes about the internal monologue of self-rejection, where one part of you is trying to be nice and the other part is like, "Ugh, you're a loser." Her advice is to just be patient. Keep showing up. Jackson: So you have to... ask yourself to hang out? And then deal with yourself saying no? Olivia: Pretty much. You have to learn to participate in your own interests without judgment. And this leads to her ultimate 'solution,' which she presents in a chapter called "The Ugly Duckling 2." She critiques the original story, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for giving kids false hope. Jackson: False hope? They're classic stories about overcoming adversity. Olivia: She argues they're lies. The ugly duckling just happened to be a swan. Rudolph just happened to have a nose that was useful in a once-in-a-lifetime fog. She asks, "What do I do if I’m useless and ugly forever?" What if your flaw never becomes a strength? Jackson: That is a terrifyingly good question. What's her answer? Olivia: She tells a new story. About an ugly frog. And in her story, the ugly frog doesn't become a handsome prince or a beautiful swan. He just stays an ugly frog. He has a moment of clarity where he realizes that life is fundamentally pointless, that everything is equally ridiculous. And you know what he does? Jackson: I'm almost afraid to ask. Olivia: "He went sledding because why not." Jackson: So the moral isn't 'you'll become a beautiful swan,' it's 'you're an ugly frog, life is pointless, so you might as well go sledding'? Olivia: Exactly. It’s about radical acceptance. Not of your future potential, but of your current, weird, 'pointless' self. The solution isn't to fix your flaws, but to accept them and find joy anyway.

Jackson: Wow. So what's the real 'solution' in Solutions and Other Problems? It sounds like the solution is that there are no solutions. Olivia: I think it's that the search for a grand, perfect solution is the problem itself. Brosh argues that life is a series of absurd, tragic, and hilarious events that don't connect neatly into a story of progress or meaning. The only 'solution' is to stop fighting the chaos, embrace the absurdity, and show compassion to yourself and others navigating the same mess. Jackson: It’s not about finding meaning, but about finding moments of joy—like laughing at a balloon or going sledding—within the meaninglessness. Olivia: Precisely. It's about accepting that you are a flawed, weird, and sometimes sad animal, and that's okay. In fact, it's universal. Her final advice on befriending yourself is that you have to do it "because nobody should have to feel like a pointless little weirdo alone. Especially if they are." Jackson: That's a powerful idea. It makes me wonder, what's the most absurd 'balloon on a truck' moment our listeners have seen that perfectly captured how they felt? That one image that was so ridiculous it was profound. I'd love to hear those stories. Olivia: Share them with us. This is Aibrary, signing off.