Books have a funny way of begetting more books. Readers of all stripes are compelled by what they love (or hate) to take a crack at writing their own book; nonfiction writers build on the work of others to expand the literature of a field. And in the past two decades or so, books about the experience of reading—so-called biblio-memoirs—have become more popular.
The biblio-memoir marries autobiographical and literary analysis, telling a personal story by chronicling the experience of reading particularly revelatory texts. In this type of memoir, books are generally held up as life-changing talismans. Take, for instance, the classics scholar and critic Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2017 memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, about how reading Homer alongside his 81-year-old father deepened their relationship, or Jenn Shapland’s 2020 book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, in which she shows how the Southern Gothic author’s personal archive helped her assert her own queer identity.
Biblio-memoirs can be as distinctive as the lives and books they document, but they tend to support the idea that reading is good for you—that it can teach you things, or help you better understand yourself and others. The first hint that Sarah Chihaya’s darkly humorous new entry in this small genre will follow a different path lies in its title, Bibliophobia. It is not a paean to the healing powers of narrative, but an account of how her reliance on books played a major role in a crisis, leading her, for a time, to fear them.
Despite the title, Chihaya’s memoir doesn’t argue that books are worthy of repulsion. After all, she’s loved reading since she learned how to do so at age 4. As a child she immersed herself in Anne of Green Gables’ fictional Canadian town of Avonlea; as a young adult, she was possessed by A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Along the way, Chihaya dedicated her life to reading. She pursued a career as an English professor at Princeton, where, in order to secure tenure, she needed to publish an academic monograph—a deeply researched study of a literary concept.
Instead, she wrote Bibliophobia, which recounts how her relationship with books intersected with a mental-health emergency that landed her in a psychiatric ward, where she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. In her memoir, Chihaya rereads the stories that shaped her, in an effort to trace the roots of her breakdown and chart a new path forward. What results is a nuanced reevaluation of the complicated desire to lose oneself in a story.
Chihaya begins her unconventional memoir by writing about her hospital stay in the winter of 2019. During that period, she wasn’t just experiencing a severe depressive episode; she was also suffering from the effects of the titular bibliophobia. The latter is a real clinical diagnosis—the fear of books—but Chihaya takes that only as a starting point. Diagnosing herself, she expands on the official definition, describing the condition as “a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound—perhaps too profound—attachments to books and literature”; and “about the fear of the idea of books themselves.” For Chihaya, depression and bibliophobia fed each other.
Chihaya’s version of bibliophobia grew out of the fear of one book in particular—the monograph that her career demanded and that she could not bring herself to write. Her writer’s block turned into a debilitating reading block. As she struggled to read more than a paragraph at a time, she wondered, “Am I going crazy … or am I just tired and scared that my career, which is to say my life, is over before it has even begun?” Though her hospitalization addressed the most acute symptoms of her depression, it worsened her bibliophobia, which, after her release, she describes as an “acute physical condition: I would look at a series of words and just not be able to make sense of them.”
An outside observer might argue that Chihaya’s symptoms simply reflected a common sort of professional panic brought on by a ticking tenure clock. But her career features minimally in Bibliophobia, and she writes about a troubled relationship with books that began long before she started down what she calls the “conveyor belt” of academia. While growing up in Ohio as the daughter of Japanese Canadian immigrants, Chihaya turned to reading as an escape—she descibes using books as a way to retreat from her father’s mercurial temperament, from the self-loathing she experienced in “whitest suburbia,” and most of all from her own depression, which led to three suicide attempts by age 18. But losing herself in books wasn’t a simple salve for loneliness, or feelings of outsiderness, and it did little to alleviate her depression. “For me, being a depressed person and being a reader-writer are knotted up in each other all the way back to the beginning,” she writes. “All my crises are scrawled in the margins of the novels I’ve read over and over again, sometimes to feel safe, sometimes to sink willfully into further despair.”
Early in Bibliophobia, Chihaya identifies the two competing “imaginary texts” that long undergirded how she saw herself and the world around her, offering “the comforting illusion of form in a formless life.” The first was the book she was sure she would someday find if she read enough, which would reveal everything about the world and her place in it. The second was the book of her own life, one she was certain would be short and tragic. Governed by these two narratives, Chihaya read “with vicious desperation” in search of the book that would save her.
Throughout her memoir, Chihaya reflects on the books that she auditioned for that lifesaving role. Crucially, the books that Chihaya reexamines in Bibliophobia are not just those that offered comfort or respite, such as Anne of Green Gables. Among Chihaya’s strongest meditations is an early chapter on reading Toni Morrison’s “terrifying, unexpected, essential” novel The Bluest Eye as a high-school student who hated her appearance and self-harmed. Morrison’s novel tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl in Lorain, Ohio, after the Great Depression, who suffers abuse and alienation culminating in a delusion that she’s been granted the blue eyes she’s always dreamed of.
In Pecola, teenage Chihaya saw something of herself. “This recognition was a far cry from the warm embrace of relatability that readers often seek from sympathetic characters,” Chihaya writes. “Pecola’s wish for the bluest eyes, and her dissociative belief that she has received them, jabbed a bruise I did not know I had. I recognized the shape of her hopeless and intense desire, a shape that felt instinctively familiar, as if I could trace its razor-edged curves with my own dark, narrow eyes squeezed shut.” In this moment of personal reflection via literary criticism, Chihaya shows how some of the books that most affected her did so in difficult, even painful ways.
Chihaya similarly scrutinizes books in which she found great pleasure, unraveling the harmful lessons she clung to long after reading them. She describes her first encounter with Possession—Byatt’s novel about Victorian poets and scholarly discovery—as a whirlwind romance, one that awakened her desire for “the endless venture of literary study.” Possession was the book that taught Chihaya about the “joyful work” of close reading, but even as it helped her find a vocation, she over-applied the meaning-making powers of literary analysis. As a college student, Chihaya thought “there was nothing … that couldn’t be read, parsed, and interpreted like a work of literature, not people, not books, not events. This made everything safe and explainable.” This perspective also reduced her friends to fixed characters, and “calcified” her own sense of self. The most dangerous idea she stubbornly had about herself, she writes, was “that I was a lost cause.”
A pitfall of the biblio-memoir is that reading about other people’s experiences of reading can be a bit like reading about other people’s dreams. Although Bibliophobia is never academic, it is often abstract, a tendency that Chihaya links to her depression: “As a reader, I am always diffusing into the world of fiction. As a writer, I cannot solidify into direct statements … In my most lost moments, I see myself disintegrating and drifting into everything and everyone else.”
When Chihaya is diagnosed with depression, she writes, she feels “suddenly made legible by my enrollment in an unseen international association of other officially depressed people.” This provides a certain comfort, and a new plot for her life, based in reality rather than fiction. It also eventually helps her find a way back to reading. Though she doesn’t suggest that those dark moments are all behind her, she writes that the realization that “the end was not the end” in the book of her life opened her up to a new way of being, both with books and in the world. “I am trying now to let life happen as it happens, and to move through the world without constructing a predetermined narrative to cling to,” she writes. It is a reminder that instead of searching for a story that explains everything, we might do well to embrace the uncertainty of the unwritten pages still before us.
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