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PRESENTER: Please welcome Allie Brosh.
[APPLAUSE]
ALLIE BROSH: OK, so I'm going to read
you the first story in the book.
So if you haven't read the book yet,
you're getting a head start.
Let me make sure my clicker's working.
When I was 10 years old, I wrote a letter to my future self
and buried it in my backyard.
17 years later, I remembered that I
was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier.
I looked forward to getting a nostalgic glimpse
into my childhood.
Perhaps I would marvel at my own innocence,
or see the first glimmer of my current aspirations.
As it turns out, it just made me feel real weird about myself.
The letter was scrawled in green crayon
on the back of the utility bill.
My 10-year-old self had obviously not
spent much time planning out the presentation of it.
Most likely, I had simply been walking through the kitchen,
and suddenly realized it was entirely
possible to write a letter to my future self.
The overwhelming excitement of this realization
probably cause me to panic and short circuit,
making me unable to locate proper writing elements.
There was no time for that kind of thing.
I did, however, manage to fight through the haze of chaos
and impulse long enough to find a crayon stub and a paper
surface to match it against.
The letter begins thusly.
"Dear 25-year-old."
Note, not dear 25-year-old me, or dear 25-year-old self.
Just dear 25-year-old.
Do you still like dogs?
What is your favorite dog?
Do you have a job training dogs?
Is Murphy still alive?
Foreshadowing.
What is your favorite food?
Are mom and dad still alive?
I feel it's important to note the order of those questions.
Obviously, dog-related subjects were my chief concern.
Murphy was my family's dog, followed closely
by the need to know my future favorite food.
I feel that the double question marks
speak to how important that question was.
And you guys can't see that, but there
were double question marks in there.
Only then did I pause to wonder whether my parents had
survived.
[LAUGHTER]
The letter continues with a section titled, "About Me."
My name is Allie, and I am 10 years old.
I have blonde hair and blue eyes.
My favorite dog is a German Shepherd.
My second favorite dog is a husky.
My third favorite dog is a Doberman Pinscher.
This is troubling for a number of reasons, the first of which
is that I apparently thought my future self wouldn't
be aware of my name or eye color.
[LAUGHTER]
The second thing is the fact that I just
tacked on my favorite dog breeds at the end
there, like it was every bit as important to my identity
as the other things, as if my past self had imagined
my future self standing in the yard, above the upturned earth,
clutching my letter and screaming,
but what dogs did I like?
How am I supposed to understand my identity without knowing
what dogs I liked when I was 10?
I take a break from writing at that point
to draw several pictures of what appear to be German shepherds.
Below the German shepherds, I wrote the three most disturbing
words in the entire letter, three words that revealed more
about my tenuous grasp on reality
than anything else I have uncovered about my childhood.
There at the bottom of the letter,
I had taken my crayon stub and used
it to craft the following sentence.
"Please write back."
[LAUGHTER]
Judging by the thick, purposeful lines in each letter,
I was applying a truly impressive amount of pressure
to the crayon.
The sincerity of the request is unmistakable.
When I asked my future self what my favorite dog is,
or whether my mom and dad were still alive,
I actually expected to get answers.
And apparently, I still expected to be 10 years old
when I got those answers.
"Please write back."
I imagine myself patiently standing in the yard,
day after day, thinking, any time now.
It's going to happen soon.
I just know it.
Time travel is a complex subject that I
don't expect a 10-year-old to fully understand.
But this is more than just a basic misunderstanding
of time travel.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm almost definitely not a time traveler.
But in case I am, I decided to write back.
In fact, I decided to write letters
to several iterations of my past self,
because I felt there were important things I could
explain to myself or things I could warn myself about.
Allow me to begin with a letter to my two-year-old self.
Dear two-year-old, face cream is not edible.
No matter how much it looks like frosting,
no matter how many times you try,
it's always going to be face cream and never frosting.
I promise I wouldn't lie to you about this.
It's honestly never going to be frosting.
For the love of ***, please stop.
I need those organs you're ruining.
Dear four-year-old.
Allow me preface this by saying that I don't
know why you started eating salt in the first place.
But regardless of the precipitating circumstances,
there you are.
As soon as you became aware that eating huge amounts of salt
is really, really uncomfortably salty,
you should have stopped eating salt.
That's the solution.
The solution is not to begin eating pepper
to cancel out the salt.
You've found yourself in this predicament several times now.
And every time, you get trapped in this totally preventable
cycle.
You've done more than enough experimenting
to come to the conclusion that pepper is not
the opposite of salt all by yourself.
But somehow, you seem to remain stubbornly unaware
of this fact.
[LAUGHTER]
To reiterate, no matter how much pepper you eat,
it won't undo the ludicrous amount of salt
you ate before it.
The only thing you're accomplishing by eating pepper
is making your mouth taste like pepper and salt.
Similarly, switching back to salt
again won't cancel out the burning
from the pepper you ate to cancel out the original salt.
How is this so difficult to understand?
You can stop whenever you want to do.
As a side note, you really need to start
learning from your mistakes.
Believe me, I know what happens when
you discover electric fences next year.
And you could do without that seventh jolt of electricity.
Dear five-year-old.
What the *** is wrong with you?
Normal children don't have dead imaginary friends.
Normal children don't pick open every single one
of their chicken pox scabs and then
stand naked and bleeding in the darkened doorway
to their bedroom until someone walks past and asks
what they are doing.
Furthermore, normal children don't respond by saying,
I wanted to know what all my blood would look like.
Normal children also don't watch their parents sleep
from the corner of their room.
Mom was really scarred by "The Exorcist" when she was younger,
and she doesn't know how to cope with your increasingly
creepy behavior.
Please stop.
Please, please stop.
Dear six-year-old.
You're having an absurdly difficult time learning
the letter R. You practice all the time,
and you have mastered every other letter in the alphabet,
both uppercase and lowercase.
But for reasons beyond my comprehension,
R just destroys you.
Look at this.
How does that happen?
How do you mess something up that badly?
The first one is understandable.
But what's going on with that middle one?
Have did that extra protrusion get there?
And look at the tiny one on the right.
That one has four protrusions.
I'm not an expert on protrusions,
but that's way too many.
I think if you took some time to relax and really
look at the letter R, you'd see that it's not nearly as
complicated as you're making it.
Dear seven-year-old.
Look at the other children around you.
Do you see how they're wearing clothing?
That's because they're seven years old,
and they've all realized that it's
no longer appropriate to take their clothes off in public.
But you haven't realized that, have you?
People have tried to explain it to you.
Your teachers have tried.
Your parents have tried.
Even the other students have expressed discomfort
with your persistent and inexplicable nakedness.
But you just don't stop.
Why do you want to be naked so badly?
Do you even know why?
Are you overtaken by forces beyond your control
that make you do this?
Regardless, clothing is a reality
that you need to accept.
There are no loopholes to this.
You can't take your clothes off and hide
in the corner hoping no one notices.
You can't trick the teachers into letting
you be naked by burying yourself in the sandbox.
Your clothes are in a pile next to you.
They know.
Dear 10-year-old.
Wow, you really like dogs.
In fact, you like dogs so much, that I'm not
even sure it's emotionally healthy.
It might be normal to love dogs a lot,
or to be really interested in dogs.
But you go way, way past that.
Normal children don't walk around pretending
to be a dog nearly as much as you do, for example.
You're 10.
It makes people wonder about your developmental progress
when you growl and bark at them.
An even more concerning issue is the obstacle course.
Fine, you want to train your dog to run through an obstacle
course.
That's pretty normal.
What isn't normal is making your mother time you
as you crawl through the course on all fours
over and over again.
You're making mom think that she did something
wrong to make you this way.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way,
allow me answer your questions.
Do you still like dogs?
Yes, but not as much as you do.
I've developed a healthy relationship with dogs.
What is your favorite dog?
I don't know.
This may cause a surprise to you,
but knowing exactly where each dog breed ranks
on my list of favorites isn't the pressing issue
that it used to be.
Do you have a job training dogs?
No.
I can't even train my own dogs, let alone
the dogs of other people.
Is Murphy still alive?
Of course not.
I don't know whether you're being
optimistic are you actually don't understand
that dogs won't live to be 25.
But you really set yourself up for a lot of disappointment
there.
What is your favorite food?
Nachos.
Which is fortunate, because in the future,
you're dysfunctional and you don't take care of yourself.
So you end up eating a whole lot of nachos.
Are mom and dad still alive?
Actually, you turn out to be Batman,
so we had to have them put down for storyline purposes.
Dear 13-year-old.
I think everyone was relieved when you started to grow out
of your unhealthy obsession with dogs.
Unfortunately, now you think you're a wizard.
I know this because I found your collection of spells.
Tell me, how does mixing dijon mustard with sand,
and then eating it, makes someone love you?
[LAUGHTER]
First of all, I thought that your extensive early
experiences with ingesting nonfood substances
would put you off of attempting something like this.
Secondly, no one is going to love you
until you stop doing things like trying to make them love you
by eating mustard sand.
Dear other iterations of my past self.
Thank you for not being so ***
weird that I felt I had to address you personally
in a letter from the future.
I commend you.
The end.
[APPLAUSE]
So, questions I guess, now?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
ALLIE BROSH: Hi.
AUDIENCE: What's your writing process like?
ALLIE BROSH: Oh boy.
OK.
So I start out with a really specific but vague sense
of what I want the post to feel like
and what I want it to read like.
The problem with that is that it's
sort of like looking at something
out of your peripheral vision.
You can't really focus on it.
And so you have to just steer closer to it.
And you know when it's really wrong.
You don't know when it's right.
So most of the writing a post process
is just steering it closer to what
this arbitrary, weird mental image I have in my head is.
I also have a folder system on my desktop.
I have the idea farm.
And that's where there's just like one-word, random ideas.
Sometimes I don't even remember what
I was thinking when I wrote them.
But I revisit that folder periodically
and try to see if there's any new perspective that I
have on one of those things.
And if there is a new perspective--
like maybe a new angle, something that can actually
steer it toward being an actual story with structure--
I move it to another folder, which
is-- what's that one called.
I think it's post-holding area.
And that's where I start actually working on it
legitimately.
And then once it starts taking shape,
to the point where I feel like I can maybe
start adding drawings, I move it to the folder
called "Look at this, ***."
And that's to get me to look at it.
Because I won't otherwise.
And then once it's in that folder,
I know that it's serious and I need to take it very seriously
and start drawing pictures.
Does that answer your question?
All right.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
As someone who has had dead fish before,
I can say that I really appreciated
that particular comic.
And I think it was widely recognized
as something that was very human and an interesting, different
perspective on the subject than I
think many other people had ever seen before.
And I think that was really courageous and great.
ALLIE BROSH: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for writing that.
And as a follow up question, what's your favorite dog?
[LAUGHTER]
ALLIE BROSH: My favorite dog?
Oh boy.
A wolf.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Is there a technical term for the hair piece
that your character wears?
Is it a ponytail?
ALLIE BROSH: OK.
That's-- I sort of have come to think of it as a shark fin
a little bit.
It did start out as hair.
And then I got sort of annoyed drawing hair for myself,
and so I just did this little triangle thing.
And now it's a shark fin.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I just wanted to say, first of all,
that I don't know if it's the same post that guy was talking
about, but I really, really loved the post
about Allie trying to kill the fish, then she would spare it.
Yeah, that was my favorite.
I was cracking up for ages.
But anyways, I wanted to ask, you always
seem to have this wealth of ideas that you write about.
And I was wondering how you prevent yourself
from hitting blogger's block?
ALLIE BROSH: Well, I feel like I thought that I was out of ideas
pretty much like three weeks after I started my blog.
And I don't know.
I just keep going back to it and keep trying.
Like I said, I write down in may ideas farm thing,
I just will write down.
Even if I think something's a horrible idea,
I'll write it down anyway if it's
a word that maybe is intriguing.
And I've had stuff where I come back to it three years later.
And it's like, finally.
OK, now I can do something with this.
Whereas before, I maybe hadn't had the experience yet
that would allow me to turn that actually into a story.
There are some stories that are you had to be there
stories, until I figure out what the little ironies are,
what the little inconsistencies are in the story
to draw out to make it actually funny
and read like there's a structure to it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ALLIE BROSH: You're welcome.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
ALLIE BROSH: Oh, hi.
I like your cone.
That's good.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: So your drawings have this amazing like-- they're
deformed in these weird ways that are also,
they seem to get across the emotion more than
if it was just like a normal looking person.
I'm wondering, do you know beforehand
how you're going to deform a face that it looks
so proud and so twisted, or do you try like a million times?
ALLIE BROSH: I do have to try a million times.
Like what I was saying before, where
I have this really vague but very specific thing.
If that makes sense.
It's a specific sense.
But the image in my head is vague.
And I have to do quite a few drafts of my drawings
to get it to look somewhat close to what I'm imagining.
And so sometimes, it's actually good
that I don't know what I'm doing, because I'll
draw something and I'll be like, oh hey,
I wouldn't have thought of drawing
that face if I didn't just take a stab at it.
But yeah, it definitely takes a really long time
to get the face just right.
Sometimes the people, the eye, if you
move it even like half a millimeter,
it makes a huge difference in the facial expression.
And you wouldn't think that something
like that would make such a big difference.
But I guess maybe just to me it does.
AUDIENCE: Well, they're awesome.
Thank you.
ALLIE BROSH: You're welcome.
AUDIENCE: Did you intentionally hit on the artistic style
and keep it consistent intentionally,
or is this just the thing that came out?
ALLIE BROSH: This is the thing that came out.
It's been an evolution.
When I first started drawing my character,
it was just like a circle head with a triangle body thing.
And since then, there are things like edits
I've made to it that have slowly made it what it is today, which
is sort of like this fish-tadpole-bird thing,
I don't know what.
All the shapes that I find funny, I guess.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I think your work is really relatable to a ton of people,
because of how genuine it feels.
You're part of a generation of authors like Jenny Lawson
and Matt [? Eiman ?] that you just read their stuff
and you feel so much like this is something
that could have happened to me.
Or I remember something that happened me now
that exactly is like that.
I wonder though, since you're also
a great comedian, how much of what
you write over the last four or five years,
do you feel detached from it?
Or do you truly feel like you're doing
something autobiographical?
Like, do look back at things you wrote
and you're like, no, that's exactly how I feel now.
Or do you feel like you iterate over, again and again,
to make it more of a polished product?
ALLIE BROSH: I definitely spend a lot of time polishing.
I think that my job as a writer or a comedian
is to take whatever thing is in my head
and figure out how to translate it most
faithfully into other people's hands.
And so, that involves a lot of very specific word choices.
So most of the editing process is just getting the word
choices down exactly right to-- it
can be the subtleties and shades that I'm trying to get across.
As far as how I feel looking back on stories,
I think I do put myself in my head-- like,
say when I'm a kid-- I write from my perspective as a kid.
So my mom is very much the villain from my perspective.
Clearly, from the reader's perspective,
she's just being a good mom and doing what she needs to do.
But yeah, so from my perspective as a kid,
she was being mean and evil, and I
think that answers the question.
I feel like I'm rambling.
AUDIENCE: No, that's great.
Thanks
ALLIE BROSH: Hi.
AUDIENCE: So I imagine these days,
with the book coming out and all that, you're on the road a lot
and a lot of changes.
How are simple dog and helper dog dealing with your absence?
ALLIE BROSH: They're good.
We have them staying with a vet tech
at our veterinary hospital, and she's great.
She's been sending us pictures of them just to say, hey,
they're doing good.
But yeah, they're doing very well.
They've adjusted to life in bend.
The simple dog knows how to go up and down the stairs now.
She still sort of sidewinds though.
Like when she's going down, she'll
do like this weird thing.
But yeah, they're doing very well.
AUDIENCE: So I think a lot of people related to your comic
about the Alot.
ALLIE BROSH: A lot of people.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if-- I find
that I have certain typographical mistakes that I
make, especially when I'm typing quickly, that bother me.
And I was wondering whether a lot was a thing
that you use to help correct yourself,
or whether there are other mistakes like that you're
trying to fight?
ALLIE BROSH: So a lot was never really a problem for me.
The thing that I have problems with are double letters.
When spelling a word, I'm great at spelling,
except for if there's a double letter in there.
If there's two L's or two T's, I'm ***.
I don't know how to spell the word.
So I've been trying to memorize which
ones have the double letters.
AUDIENCE: So, he beat me to it, but the Alot post
was really amazing.
ALLIE BROSH: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: But I was wondering if-- I
don't know how to pronounce it-- spaghatta nadle is coming back
at all?
ALLIE BROSH: People really like that *** noodle.
[LAUGHTER]
I think, eventually, he will have to come back.
Enough people really like him.
And if I get drunk or really tired,
sometimes I'm just really in the mood for spaghatta nadle.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So what made you start drawing this?
Did it start with the blog?
Did you just draw things like this
and tell stories about yourself in the past?
ALLIE BROSH: Yeah.
I mean, I've always written stories just
as a means to entertain myself.
I used to try to write books when I was a kid.
They were mostly about guys fighting things and just going
on adventures where they fight more things.
So yeah, I guess I was procrastinating when I actually
started my blog.
I was supposed to be studying for a physics final
for college.
And I eventually did study for it,
but at this particular point, I didn't want to.
And I started to write stuff online.
And I think the my style evolved--
I've been thinking a lot about this lately,
actually-- it's probably a result, sorry.
I got like 45 minutes of sleep last night,
so I'm a little scrambled in the brain.
It's a result of me subconsciously
trying to reproduce the feel of stand up comedy on the page.
I watch a lot of stand up comedy.
And when I first started just trying
to write without the pictures, I was sort of
bothered by the fact that there weren't facial expressions,
or weren't any of those non-verbal cues
that you can get from watching a stand up comedian.
And so once I started experimenting with pictures,
it felt really natural to have this thing
that you can intersperse with the text
to give maybe like a word list interaction.
Or you could say 1,000 things at once,
which is really helpful for comedic timing.
So that's how that happened.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
How do you remember, or make up, all the details
about when you were a kid?
[LAUGHTER]
ALLIE BROSH: My memory starts pretty young.
I have all right memories of most of the early stuff.
So if I write stories of when I'm like four and five,
the memories are a little spotty.
I have to talk to my mom about some
of the more storyline relevant details, about like,
for example, in the post about the cake,
meeting the entire cake.
I remember everything about that,
except for I don't actually know how I got into the room
with the cake.
I remember eating it.
I remember throwing it up all over the place.
But I don't remember how I got in there.
So with stuff like that, where I really don't remember--
and it's not a major like, it's something
like I got into the room with the cake.
So I just need to find a way to get to that point.
And I figured the most logical explanation, knowing
my grandparents' house, was the window.
So there's a little bit of that.
And sometimes I'll trim stuff down for like streamlining it
for storyline purposes, so it's not confusing.
Or, say like, oh, well I was here
with this person, this person, and this person.
I'll just like, I was here.
But yeah, they're-- you were asking about my memories.
I'm really sorry, you guys.
I knew I was going to crash at some point today.
I woke up and I was so surprised like, oh man, I
don't feel like as bad as I thought I would feel.
And now, it's all starting to come back to me.
It's catching up.
So yeah, hang in there with me.
I'm sorry.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
What would you say distinguishes you
from your character named Allie, if anything?
ALLIE BROSH: I think that my character is actually
a more accurate representation of me,
like how I really, really am.
It's like inside.
Inside that, that's what I am.
I'm this weird, absurd thing.
And yeah, like when I talk to myself,
the voice inside my head is very much this thing.
Me, I'm just yeah.
I relate more to the character.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
ALLIE BROSH: I love your costume.
AUDIENCE: What costume?
ALLIE BROSH: Oh.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming.
I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how
early you get feedback on posts, how polished you like things
to be before you get it, who you go to.
ALLIE BROSH: I pretty much just talk to my husband about it.
He's the only one in like the inner, inner post circle.
Because I start to doubt myself when
I'm hammering through stuff that never
sounds funny in the very beginning.
Because I'm stumbling over it, and I'm like oh, well,
there's this part.
And it'll be really funny, you'll see.
Like, once I draw the picture, once I draw the eyes,
you'll see it'll be really funny.
But just imagine this.
And you don't get the whole picture.
So I do just read it to Duncan.
I guess I share with my editor and my agent sometimes too.
But most of it just goes on in my own head.
I leave it for a few days if I'm really stuck, and come back
and read it and think like, hey.
Is this any better than I thought it was?
Or maybe I missed something?
Maybe I think it's horrible now?
AUDIENCE: Do you ever talk to your husband
to get ideas to get you unstuck?
ALLIE BROSH: Yeah, yeah.
We'll go on walks, these like long, nighttime walks,
and just like hammer out post ideas.
And we'll pick a topic, like identity, and say like, well.
What's important for your identity?
And he'll say to me what's important for his identity,
and then we'll just talk about it.
And it's good, because we just have
an interesting conversation, and maybe an idea
will spring from that.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
ALLIE BROSH: You're welcome.
AUDIENCE: We also have 30% of our offices
on a Hangout view this.
And so if anyone on the Hangout wants to ask a question,
just unmute in between questions, and ask away.
And I think we have time for five more minutes.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'd like to ask a question.
ALLIE BROSH: Where is it?
AUDIENCE: I'm the disembodied voice.
ALLIE BROSH: I can see me.
I can't see anybody--
AUDIENCE: I, really, really, really love your blog.
And thank God you're writing it to me.
I used to have to pet rats.
And I adored them.
And I want to have them again soon.
But I'd like to know a bit more about your pet rats.
ALLIE BROSH: They're wonderful.
I rescue them, actually.
We adopt them from-- so, you guys
have maybe seen the "Hoarders" episode with the rats.
We adopted some from that situation.
They took them out of the house and were
trying to get them homes.
So we have, I think, seven now.
And our oldest two rats are just the sweetest two rats
in the world.
There's Pizzo, who is my favorite thing
in the entire universe.
She's roughly potato-shaped and very soft.
And she's very affectionate.
And then there's Charlie, who-- Charlie's very special.
She never really settled down.
She's sort of twitchy and weird about everything.
But I love her to death.
And I could go through all of them,
but I think that wouldn't leave very much time
for other questions.
AUDIENCE: But how do they get along with helper dog?
ALLIE BROSH: The dogs leave them alone.
They know that the rat cage is special,
and they shouldn't go over there and bug them.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ALLIE BROSH: You're welcome.
AUDIENCE: I was going to ask if you've ever done
or wanted to do any spoken forms of comedy,
like improv, stand up, et cetera?
ALLIE BROSH: I actually would love to do stand up.
I don't know if I have the stage presence for it.
It terrifies me.
But I love stand up comedy.
And maybe one of these days I'll take a crack at it.
AUDIENCE: You should.
All kinds of people with terrible stage presence do it.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So when did you first realize
that some of your characters and their expressions
left your blog and were used for memes
and other forms of entertainment on the internet?
And did that change your writing at all?
ALLIE BROSH: It didn't change my writing.
I noticed it when people like my Facebook friends
would post it on my wall, and be like, did you see this?
No, I did not.
I think one of the first ones I saw
was somebody using it on a coffee shop sign,
with the chalk drawings.
And that was pretty cool.
And I see people will make their own,
and post Alot memes to my wall.
Hey, I see it all the time.
I'm always getting emails from people being like,
did you see this one and this one?
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: As an artist and a copyright holder,
how do you feel about that?
[LAUGHTER]
ALLIE BROSH: I like that the internet is having fun with it.
It's fine when people are just using it as a meme.
Having fun with it, trying to be funny, that's totally fine.
It's less fine when they are using it to sell something
or to like support a really *** point of view.
I don't know.
So those times really bother me.
But the other times, I'm totally fine with it,
when people are just having fun and trying to be funny.
PRESENTER: I think that's all we have time for.
Thank you so much.
Allie is going to be signing books at the back.
So if you want your book signed, please make an orderly line
towards the back of the room.
Thank you so much for coming.
[APPLAUSE]