Mike Birbiglia – Words Deferred

March was my recovery month. I quit slacking off and got my writing mojo back, and I also read a few books. Some are oldies from the bookshelf, and one is a new library find.

As usual, I include Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a tiny commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of massive political spending by billionaires.

Hyperbole and a Half

By Allie Brosh

Hyperbole and a Half lives in an interesting space between web-comic and autobiographical blog. It began on Blogger at a time when blogs and web-comics were approaching their zenith of popularity, and was rocketed to fame by panels that became widespread memes, like this:

Brosh’s MSPaint-style art depicts every person and animal as wide-eyed and crazed, with mouths that span their faces. Every expression is extreme. It is as hyperbolic as the name suggests.

She mines her childhood, relationships, pets, and a wide variety of unusual life experiences for material, crafting stories in the vein of comedians like Mike Birbiglia or David Sedaris, but with a chronically online millennial perspective.

Several stories follow her family’s adventures living with a “simple” dog, and the adoption of a “helper” dog who turns out to be just as problematic. She describes her childhood determination to steal a birthday cake that belongs to someone else. And she recounts the experience of being attacked by an angry, wild goose in her own house.

Brosh also uses the same comic-story lens to examine her experiences with depression and becoming suicidal. These heavy topics are treated with vulnerable honesty while still managing to find the humor lurking in these dark corners (or under the fridge, in this case).

Solutions and Other Problems

By Allie Brosh

Solutions and Other Problems is the long-awaited sequel to Hyperbole and a Half. Seven years have passed between books. Brosh has gone through medical issues, mental health challenges, divorce and remarrying. The book still contains plenty of her trademark goofiness, but there is a notable shift in tone and perspective.

Brosh has also clearly leveled-up her art. It somehow manages to convey the same level of absurdity and retains the lo-fi MSPaint aesthetic while being far more detailed and varied.

Where many of the stories in the first book originally appeared on the Hyperbole and a Half blog, almost all of the content of this second book is new. Which probably explains the dearth of content on the blog in recent years.

If you enjoyed the blog and the first book, the second book provides more of the same, and does almost all of it even better.

The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable

By Terry Pratchett, Illustrated by Paul Kidby

This was an unexpected library find for me. The Last Hero is a lushly illustrated novella, written for the same adult audience as Pratchett’s other Discworld books. It occupies that sparse space between comics, children’s books, and novels. In fact, the only other illustrated story like this that I can think of is The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. It’s too bad that experimentation in format like this is so rare.

Drawing from the usual massive cast of Discworld characters, this story stars Rincewind (the original inept wizard from Pratchett’s earliest books), the brilliant Da Vinci-esque inventor Leonard of Quirm, Cohen the Barbarian, and a supporting cast of wizards and barbarian heroes.

The barbarians are growing old, and they want to go out with a bang. They want to return fire to the gods. A whole lot of it. Unfortunately, exploding the magical mountain where the gods live will very likely destroy the entire Discworld, so the wizards and Leonard set out to stop them.

The storyline following Cohen and the barbarians parodies the classic D&D “murder-hobo” style of heroism, and the storyline of Leonard building a craft to fly to the highest mountain on the Disc parodies classic space-dramas and the Apollo program.

The illustrations are incredibly beautiful and detailed, in the mold of the best classic fantasy covers, so the absurdity of Discworld details (like “Wizzard” stitched onto Rincewind’s pointy hat) stand out all the more.

What I’m Reading in April

I’ve come to the realization that I often talk about reading books in this section, only for them to not appear in next month’s report.

I’m not messing with you. I promise. I just have a bad habit of reading too many things at once. And now I’ve found an exciting new way to increase my number of half-finished books, through the power of audio books!

That’s right, I’m currently listening to Fonda Lee’s Jade City on Libro.fm. And I’m still in the midst of American Gods and Ted Chiang’s short stories. And some day I’ll get beyond the first chapter of the final Witcher book. If we’re really being honest, I’ll probably pick up something else before the month is out.

What will I actually finish? Tune in next month to find out.

I live in the suburbs, but we are within spitting distance of the city proper. Thanks to an intersection of nearby highways, most of the streets in our neighborhood don’t go through, so it’s nice and quiet, but also close to busier areas. Now, my kids range from early grade school to middle school, and this summer they’ve been eager to go out and play with their friends around the neighborhood. They want to go places and do things unsupervised.

The impression I get about children growing up in the 70s and earlier is that parenting mostly consisted of making sure that your children had a reasonable number of meals per day and did chores to build character. Other than that, children just went where they pleased. However, today’s parents have been drowned in stories of kidnappers, serial murderers and razor blades in Halloween candy all of their lives. “Helicopter parenting” is a phrase spoken with derision, and yet there is an awful lot of media focused on all of the terrible things that can happen to a child, if only you take your eyes off them for a moment.

My children want to run around the neighborhood with various other children. They are not particularly good at telling me where they’re going or keeping track of time. But I’ve forced myself to give them a little more space than I’m comfortable with. This is one of the things that I’ve had to come to grips with as a parent. Parenting is a compromise: the kids probably get less freedom than they want, and I get less control and less reassurance. As the kids get older (and they keep on getting older!) the boundaries will keep shifting.

Comfort is Stagnation

My own complete comfort as a parent is not necessarily what is best for my kids to grow and become self-sufficient and responsible. And my own comfort as a writer is not necessarily what is best for my stories to grow and improve. That’s right, you just walked into a metaphor!

Discomfort is the natural human reaction to shifting boundaries and new ideas. To challenge your limitations and grow, you have to work on something you’re not entirely sure you can do. Sometimes these experiments lead to success, and sometimes they fail. But whenever I try some new and difficult writing project, I end up taking away valuable new ideas, experience and skills.

Being a good parent also requires admitting that you don’t always know what you’re doing, and you don’t know how exactly you’ll end up affecting your children. After all, the world is full of well-meaning parents whose parenting styles have contributed to their children’s hang-up and neuroses. We are all, to some extent, the products of our upbringing.

Stories, like children, are a product of their parents. My thoughts, my dreams, my ideas all come out in my writing, either directly or in subtext. My unspoken assumptions may be on the page even when I don’t realize it. However, it’s easy to self-censor.

We all have secrets and darker thoughts. Things we’re not proud of. Shame or embarrassment, enviousness, and worry. We don’t talk about these things with our co-workers. We don’t bring them up at parties. We may not even dare whisper them to our husbands and wives, our trusted relatives or closest friends.

Letting those things creep into our writing is hard. It’s like opening up your soul and letting strangers look inside. We fear being judged. Now, perhaps more than ever before, judging strangers is a popular pastime. But this kind of vulnerability is powerful.

Embrace Vulnerability

Mike Birbiglia has a show called The New One, about becoming a father, and the changes that it wrought on his life. It’s comedy, but it has serious elements too. In one of the darkest parts, he admits that he “understood why some dads leave.” He didn’t leave, but he understands it. That’s vulnerability. It’s the sort of statement that could ruin relationships. But it’s honest, and it’s one of the most powerful parts of the show.

Mike has stated that many people judge him for those statements. He gets messages about it on social media. But he also gets messages from people who connected with it, and his process of working through and accepting parenthood made them feel understood and helped them work through similar feelings.

That kind of brutal honesty, that acceptance of the truth of the situation, no matter how uncomfortable or upsetting, is a hallmark of good writing. Those are the things that audiences connect to, because your secret shame or fear or sadness or loathing feels like less of a burden when you discover that you’re not alone.

Plumb the Depths

Achieving this kind of honesty is difficult. The first hurdle is being honest with yourself. People don’t typically like to evaluate themselves with complete honesty. Luckily, we’re all complex individuals, and we don’t have to dig up all the skeletons at once.

One of the easiest ways to get started is to simply think about negative emotions. What are your fears? Are you jealous of others? What feelings do you have that you wouldn’t want to tell to others? You don’t have to write a biography of all of your problems, but sometimes, thinking through these darker aspects of the self will shed light on a topic that could be a powerful inclusion in a story.

Sometimes, taking an honest look at the unpleasant parts of ourselves can be cathartic. It’s a common-enough trope that the writer who writes about their deepest issues can use fiction as a mode of healing. Hiding from problems rarely helps fix them.

On the other hand, I’m definitely not a mental health professional. If going down these roads makes things worse, it’s possible that you need more than fiction to get to a better place. Don’t embrace the old “romantic” notions of writers who actively hurt their health for their work.

It’s also worth noting that some of the difficult truths in our lives may involve relationships with friends or family. If you’re going to put your loved ones into your fiction in a way where they will recognize themselves (or others will recognize them), talk to those people first. Don’t destroy relationships for a story.

Writer, Know Thyself

It’s difficult to infuse a story with the hard truths from our own lives, but this uncomfortable honesty can take fiction to new levels and really help us connect with readers. If your stories never make you feel exposed, consider whether you’re skirting around these areas of discomfort. It may sometimes be painful, but it’s one of the most effective ways to grow as a writer.

Tag: Mike Birbiglia

The Read Report — March