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A "soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative" (Whiting Foundation) memoir about reading, writing, and depression.
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect "Life Ruiners".
Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah's deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?
Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.
"Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya's plaintive debut. Evocative and astute ... her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful. The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With beauty and precision, Chihaya weaves her experiences as a lifetime reader and deep appreciator of books into accounts of heartbreak, identity issues, mental-health crises, and family. She analyzes pivotal texts with generosity, vulnerability, and humor ... [Bibliophobia] may encourage rereading or reading anew, and taking a closer look into how literature can sustain or derail us. It also feels like a force that may become, for some, its own brand of Life Ruiner." —Booklist (starred review)
"Vulnerable yet acerbic, this moving interrogation of the stories that helped Chihaya survive in a predominantly white environment validates the real and raw ways in which books shape people's internal and external identities in personal, political, psychological, and social ways." —Library Journal (starred review)
"The book offers more than some readers will want to know, but it's probing and wrenchingly honest. An elegantly written memoir of a lifelong struggle with mental illness." —Kirkus Reviews
"An instant classic in the books-about-books genre, this heady, confiding memoir offers a refreshingly nuanced take on what books do to us. They do not always make us better, more empathetic citizens of the world. Sometimes they haunt us, force us to face things we don't want to see, and ruin our lives. Sarah Chihaya has done something remarkable: written a book about losing yourself in books that you can lose yourself in." —Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet
"Bibliophobia feels like the first book I have ever read that accords the correct (massive) weight to the role of books in my own life, reminding me how high the stakes were when I first fell in love with reading, and restoring to me the sense that books are still a matter of life and death. At once a radical analysis of the relationship between reading, writing, and suicide, and a case study in how seemingly unnarratable and overwhelming experience can be transformed into a transcendent book. A must for any obsessive reader." —Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, Either/Or, and Possessed
This information about Bibliophobia was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn.
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