Allie Brosh

Early life Brosh was raised in Auburn, California, and Sandpoint, Idaho. In an interview with Mother Jones, she stated that these rural settings allowed her to "be a little bit weirder.”

She graduated with a degree in human biology from the University of Montana, where she also participated in track. Brosh has ADHD, which she says was more severe when she was a child.

Hyperbole and a Half blog Brosh started Hyperbole and a Half in 2009 to avoid studying for her college physics final exam. The blog was fully active in 2009 and 2010. During this time, Brosh produced 79 and 78 posts respectively, uploading a new entry at least every few weeks.

In 2010, she said of her career as a writer, “With my crippling ADHD and impulsive decisions this is a perfect job for me. I make my own schedule." Nearly all of Brosh's posts from 2009 are text-based and have no illustrations, though some include photographs from her home and childhood. In 2010, she started producing entries that are a mix of text and illustrations. She used Paintbrush software to draw the comic. The character sometimes wears a grey hoodie when particularly depressed. and in 2013 (the year her first book was published) Advertising Age put Brosh in its yearly list of "most influential and creative thinkers and doers". After that post, Brosh's blog was inactive for more than a year. In May 2013, she made a long follow-up post chronicling her struggle with depression and thoughts of suicide. Brosh said seeing how people related to her work helped her: "Depression can be such an isolating experience, and it's deceptive, you know, you think, 'Surely I'm the only one that's ever gone through this, or felt this depth of misery.'"

First book According to The Globe and Mail, the success of the 2011 post "rocketed Brosh to serious virality, landing her a book deal." It was on The New York Times Best Seller list (Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous) for 12 weeks and on the NPR Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List for 31 weeks. The book was the American Booksellers Association’s No. 1 pick for November,

Subsequent withdrawal and second book After the first book's release, Brosh's online presence became sporadic again. After a tweet in November 2014, she disappeared again from social media and made no further updates or posts to her website. on an episode of YouTube series Tabletop, and she gave a talk in 2016 on the JoCo Cruise.

In August 2015, she announced that she was working on a new book called Solutions and Other Problems. In June 2020, the book reappeared on Simon & Schuster's website with a new cover and updated page count and description. In September 2020, Brosh publicly announced the book with a new post on her blog. Solutions and Other Problems was released on September 22, 2020. It became a New York Times Bestseller (Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous), and it had been on the list for four weeks. Ailsa Chang of NPR said that what was most striking about the work is that Brosh ricochets between zany moments and sad moments within pages, and a key theme of the book is showing compassion to yourself. Brosh's younger sister Kaitlin, who had bipolar disorder, died in 2013. Brosh referred to her sister's death as a suicide. Brosh underwent major surgery for stage IV endometriosis in 2013.

Brosh has said that she "lives like a recluse". Brosh has been active on Reddit and has said that she likes it because it was the place where her first posts got popular. When asked if she feels an obligation to update readers on her health, she said, "I have been trying to make myself be more responsible. There's a part of me that wishes that I could sort of disappear and fade back into the mists when I need to. But I know that's not how reality works. I'm trying not to disappear for quite so long, or as completely".