Her formative (or deformative) relationship with books took hold when she was a child in Ohio, stretching from her early immersion in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables to her repeated rereadings of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being when she was a Princeton professor in her thirties. It’s an obsession that builds to the moment of crisis when she finds herself in the grip of acute bibliophobia, facing down a ticking tenure clock while unable to read at all. Her memoir takes the form of an absorbing “howdunit,” tracing the complicated story of Chihaya’s life with books, and the varied ways that they contributed to her collapse.
Reading is especially risky for someone like Chihaya, because it isn’t just a pastime for her. It’s her primary mode of being in the world, in addition to being her job. She gravitated to fiction at the age of 4 as a way of escaping from family conflict and ended up reading professionally at the most elite levels, competing in one of the toughest academic job markets in history. (Though Chihaya is self-deprecating throughout, the fact remains that you have to be pretty virtuosic at reading for a multibillion-dollar educational institution to pay you to do it full-time.) At one point, she writes about her childhood fascination with legendary ice-skater Kristi Yamaguchi, but the athlete I kept thinking about as I read was Simone Biles, who famously got “the twisties” at the 2020 Olympics. What happens when the thing you’re best at, which is incidentally the thing that pays the bills, is something you can no longer safely do—something you are worried might kill you if you keep trying?
Indeed, books are often hailed as a cultural panacea. To take two examples among thousands, the ad copy for an acclaimed book about reading to your kids sounds a bit like an old-time traveling salesman hawking a patent elixir, characterizing reading as “a fast-working antidote to the fractured attention spans, atomized families and unfulfilling ephemera of the tech era, helping to replenish what our devices are leaching away.” And a recent New York Times op-ed by an English professor prescribes novels as a remedy for the evils of Trump, Andrew Tate, video games, pornography, and “the manosphere,” arguing that young men “need better stories” and “reading fiction is … an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q.” From childhood ADHD to toxic masculinity and fascism, books will apparently cure what ails us!
Still, the insistence on the salutary effects of reading persists. And a didactic or therapeutic approach to reading characterizes much of the burgeoning genre of “bibliomemoir” that has flourished over the last decade and a half. Bibliomemoir—defined by Joyce Carol Oates as “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography”—lends itself to uplifting stories about books serving the role of teachers, therapists, friends, family, or spiritual EMTs. Sometimes, the genre’s default books-to-the-rescue plot is explicitly spelled out in subtitles such as “How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter,” “How Books Restored My Appetite,” “Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf,” or “A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me” (from, respectively, William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education, Laura Freeman’s The Reading Cure, Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived, and Glory Edim’s Gather Me). Other times, the celebration of reading is less reducible to a simple takeaway, as when Elif Batuman learns to be a writer by romping around Russia in the footsteps of Tolstoy, or Jenn Shapland finds a kind of queer kinship with Carson McCullers. But the genre’s underlying pro-book message remains.
Chihaya rejects this kind of faith-based relationship to books: “Books, like people, should not be asked to save us.” She has arrived at this hard-won knowledge after a lifetime of asking books to do exactly that, and repeatedly feeling them give way beneath her. Indeed, she views all her past attempts to read “for something”—“for comfort, for pleasure, for validation, for comprehension”—as proof that she used to be a “terrible reader.” Bristling at accounts of reading that are premised on progress (“I am disturbed and irritated whenever I encounter the moralizing claim that the main point of reading fiction is relentlessly positive self-improvement”), she instead characterizes reading as a thoroughly mixed bag: “Sometimes it is nutritious. Sometimes it is poisonous. Sometimes—surprisingly often—it is both.”
Bibliophobia broadens, deepens, and disturbs our sense of reading’s risks. For Chihaya, the danger does not lie in the content of books but in her way of relating to them; not in identification with a particular character, but in her vulnerability to the violence of reading itself. At one point, she describes her propensity to depression as a lack of emotional shock absorbers, which reminded me of a passage from Virginia Woolf’s “How Should One Read a Book?”: “Great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy … is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that.” Bibliophobia is an intimate account of this bending, breaking, wrenching, and distorting.
From childhood, Chihaya’s relationship to reading is structured by “two imaginary texts”: the book of her own life, which she imagines is predestined to end in suicide, and a book she’s always looking for, “a text that would explain everything to me.” One or both of these texts haunt each of her encounters with books. Her chapter on Anne of Green Gables is a ghost story about the dangerous desire to disappear from the world, whether through reading or suicide. Her chapter on The Bluest Eye—“terrifying, unexpected, essential”—is a horror story about what Chihaya calls a “Life Ruiner”: “the book you can’t ever recover from, that you never stop thinking about, and that makes you desperate to reach that frightening depth of experience with other books.”
Bibliophobia’s many books and plots are held together firmly by its wry, reflective narrative voice. At one point, Chihaya jokes about being a “legit midcentury lady writer” by virtue of her nervous breakdown, and in fact her style is reminiscent of a mordant yet companionable midcentury Virago Modern Classic. Sarah the character might be struggling, but her story is told in a stylish, self-aware, sometimes hilariously self-ironizing tone.
Ultimately, Bibliophobia is a book of paradoxes. It’s a profoundly satisfying book about the maddening inadequacy of books. A fluidly written story about devastating writer’s block. An anti-narrative narrative with a classically pleasing structure of rising action, crisis point, denouement that would look beautiful sketched on a chalkboard.
It’s fitting that the book’s last scene depicts Chihaya and a friend reading together, “bent over the book companionably, slowly unfolding the meaning.” The scene dramatizes the utter irrepressibility of reading in Chihaya’s life, even after everything, like a lush resurgence of foliage growing on the site of a volcanic explosion. But in contrast to the book’s many scenes of solitary reading as a way to vanish or escape, it’s a scene about the way books can facilitate presence and embodied intimacy with the world beyond their pages. In the words of the dedication, it’s about “the friends who brought me back.”
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