Does anyone know what happened to allie brosh

Do you feel the book has particular resonance during this pandemic when so many people are feeling alone? At the very least, I hoped that talking about loneliness openly would help make it less scary. How have people responded to your writing about hard stuff: depression, loneliness and anxiety? The response has been very warm and supportive. And, for the most part, I think people appreciate that. You write for the first time about losing your younger sister Kaitlin, who died by suicide in Can you talk a little bit about her and what it meant to bring her into your book?

In some ways, we were close; in others, we were rivals. We shared a bedroom until I was 17, and we were both introverts, and we were both kind of weird and sensitive, and some days it was tense. She was my snake-finding buddy. You grew up together.

You were raised by the same people. There are quirks you share that nobody else has. When I was finishing the book, it was very painful to relive the happy memories, but also cathartic. In a way, drawing those memories for the book allowed me to feel connected to her again.

And I was surprised by how therapeutic that was. A couple years ago, I noticed that I was kind of restraining myself during those fleeting moments of levity, because I was self-conscious about how confusing it would be. And I was trying to suppress them! Subscribe here to get a weekly dose of empathy in your mailbox. The timing is perfect. POL founder Shelly Tygielski pictured above reports that as of this week, the group has matched one million people—givers and those in need—since March And hundreds of thousands have.

For an artist who had been open about her mental health struggles and suicidal ideations, her ongoing silence was concerning. As it turned out, some of what she was dealing with was even worse than the depression many rightly assumed was still plaguing her. Readers, worried about her mental health, posted encouraging comments on her social media pages. On Amazon, the release date of her next book went from to to Why would someone drop off the face of the internet, just as her career was taking off?

Six years later, Brosh has re-emerged with a second book, Solutions and Other Problems. The page graphic memoir comes after Brosh endured a staggering amount of tragedy during her hiatus, from a life-threatening medical scare, to the death of her younger sister, to the dissolution of her marriage. In it, as on her blog, she draws herself with a tube body and a yellow, triangle ponytail. Brosh started her blog is , while in college at the University of Montana.

Pictures turned out to be the speedier solution I was looking for. The way Brosh renders herself is part of what makes her work unmistakable: She appears frog-eyed and neckless, a stick figure in a pink dress with a blonde shark fin of a ponytail protruding from her head.

To Brosh — who compares herself to animals and bugs in conversation with notable frequency — being creature-like makes it harder for the reader to make assumptions about her as a character. In the early s, sites like Gawker and Jezebel were at their peak, and personal bloggers were doing well, too. According to blog search engine Technorati, 12, new blogs were being launched every day in , and 11 percent of bloggers surveyed were supporting themselves. Soon, so was Brosh. Adulthood successfully evaded.

Around the time she launched the site, Brosh had begun experiencing worrisome medical symptoms. It turns out, Brosh also drew a post about this experience. Feeling worse, she excused herself to the bathroom. I spend a lot of time holed up by myself with only my own behavior as a reference, so sometimes it's hard to tell how far I am from sounding human.

I need my agent and my editor for that Hi, Monika! Hi, Lauren! They spend more time around people, so they can tell me whether I sound alienating or not.

My husband, Kevin, also helps with this, but he's just as reclusive as me, so it's like two possums in a trench coat. They're gonna do better together, but it still probably doesn't sound like a person.

You were one of the first bloggers I personally ever followed and had a huge impact on early blogging culture. How do you think blogs and bloggers shaped the internet landscape today? AB: Oh gosh, I don't know… I feel like memes were sort of a blog thing at first, maybe? But I'm not sure. I think blogs probably gave us a crude model for how to talk about our lives in smaller pieces.

Before that, it was like, "write an autobiography, or get the hell out. But blogs were a little less comprehensive. Maybe they helped pave the way for even less comprehensive forms of autobiography, like Instagram and Twitter? Maybe blogs helped give a platform to people who wanted to say things, but didn't have anywhere to say them? It always felt like you had to get somebody to notice you before you could say things. But blogging was the opposite. You'd say things, and that's how people would decide whether they wanted to keep reading.

Was it hard to go off the grid for so long? Did you ever consider returning to blogging and writing before this? AB : I think it would have been harder to not go off the grid, but there were also hard things about it, yeah.

I felt lonely a lot. But I think I needed that. I think I needed to learn how to be a better space probe. I don't know if that makes sense, but thinking of things in those terms learning how to be a better space probe has been helpful for me.

It feels like that's what I am. I'm the thing that goes really far away for a really long time, and comes back with pictures of what it's like out there. You have loyal fans who have stuck by you for years, even when you take long breaks from the internet. What do you think it is about your blog and writing that keeps people coming back? AB : I've been trying to figure that out for almost a decade now. But maybe it's better to not be sure, you know? It keeps me honest.

As long as I don't know what it is, I'm gonna need to keep trying hard. Were you afraid to reenter the internet landscape? How is it different being a blogger in ? AB : It feels like being reintroduced to Earth. And not gently, either. I try not to spend too much time feeling afraid of the future, so, up until about two weeks ago, I was under the impression that none of this was real. Then, exactly when I least expected it, I drove myself to Instagram and pushed myself out of the van while it was still moving.

It's been a bit of a shock to the system, but I'll be fine. I'm adapting. I'm more durable now than ever before. If I've learned anything from the last seven years, it's that. I'm capable of withstanding WAY more than I would have expected. AB : I do enjoy it. I'm not sure if it's for the reasons I'm supposed to But you know what? I don't know how to make the app of my dreams. So I take pictures of my tomato snowman, and I post the pictures to Instagram, and I feel relatively content with the experience.

The community seems friendly. I wish there was a better way to have deeper conversation outside of direct messages, but there are other places for that. I don't expect Instagram to conform to my way of doing things. AB : I do unofficially plan to write a third book, but who knows how long it'll take. Hopefully not as long.

I have a lot of material for it already. As far as reactivating the blog full-time, definitely not. Writing books feels much more natural to me.