Bibliophobia
A Memoir
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
“Stirring and sparkling.”—The Washington Post
A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ELECTRIC LIT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH: Time, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya's plaintive debut. The author recaps her history of mental illness, including three suicide attempts, which culminated in a 2019 nervous breakdown provoked by "bibliophobia," or the intense fear of writing and reading. Along the way, she interprets her autobiography through critical appreciations of books that shaped her and her scholarly vocation. The Anne of Green Gables series, in which Chihaya immersed herself during childhood, provided a refuge from her abusive dad and her shyness. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye awakened her to issues of social justice and racism and shed light on her feelings of marginalization as a Japanese American. A.S. Byatt's Possession, about two scholars who fall in love as they study Victorian poets who might have fallen in love, illuminated Chihaya's destructive pattern of treating her own lovers and friends as if they were characters in her life story. Chihaya's depictions of her depression are evocative and astute ("I was accustomed, then addicted, to what little pain there was," she writes of her cutting habit), and her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful (Possession ignites "a pleasurably futile search for complete knowledge of the other that can never be attained—and yet—we cannot stop trying"). The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature.
