How Are You Feeling?
At the Centre of the Inside of the Human Brain
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A shocking, ethically dubious, disastrously funny, illustrated self-help book about why human beings behave in such peculiar, delightful, and unpleasant ways.
The human brain can be a bizarre and disturbing instrument. Thankfully, David Shrigley is prepared to help you with the most vexing aspects of your psyche: alcoholism (“it is terrific fun, of course, but there are problems with it”); mental illness (“unlike a hairdryer, when a brain goes wrong ‘you cannot just throw it in the river and get another one’ ”); and neurology (“We all have internal wiring. Sometimes this wiring comes loose. . . . Check for loose wires and re-fasten them with glue.”).
How Are You Feeling? takes readers on a journey between the ears, explaining how the brain decides what is right and wrong and why some people are very charming and others behave like monkeys. Dave Eggers has called Shrigley “probably the funniest gallery-type artist who ever lived.” His side-splitting illustrated handbook questions the stability of self, the meaning of help, and whether that self was ever worth helping.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This humor book masquerading as a self-help volume is a cartoon guide to your mental problems, and though it doesn't provide much in the way of solutions, it's good for some laughs. Shrigley (What the Hell Are You Doing?) is a British fine artist whose work resembles comics usually found taped to refrigerators. Here he tackles such diverse human predicaments as alcoholism ("It is terrific fun of course, but there are problems with it"), boxing ("Kill him"), and self-help books ("It's hard to tell the good advice from the bad advice. You must guess"). Shrigley's primitive, scratchy illustrations and scrawled lettering give the book a homey feel, as if it were his private notebook. A few of the short pieces are laugh-out-loud funny in their dry, acerbic British wit, and readers will be swept away by Shrigley's stream-of-consciousness Zen koans, accompanied by bleak, bare-bones illustration. The humor works best when taken in small doses, but the short texts and doodled art make it difficult not to read the book in a single sitting.
