In February 2019, Sarah Chihaya wrote to a colleague, “So sorry, I’m going through a weird medical thing (nothing to worry about) and am going to try and take a few days completely off!” What she omitted was that she had just been released from the psychiatric unit of a New York City hospital. In her excellent debut memoir, Bibliophobia, she writes, “Reader, it was the books that did it.”
Chihaya has the gift of being both dryly funny and searingly honest about her innermost thoughts. The result feels like having a long, intimate conversation with a particularly close friend. Before being hospitalized, Chihaya was working on her dissertation in literature and hoping to get tenure at a major university, but she couldn’t complete her manuscript. She had attempted suicide three times between the ages of 10 and 18; was diagnosed with depression, bulimia and obsessive compulsive disorder; and had long believed she was destined to die at her own hand. “It wasn’t a surprise that I ended up in the hospital,” she writes. “The main surprise was how long it took me to get there.” The crux of the memoir is in a confession she makes in chapter one: “Since I was a child, I have secretly believed that if I read enough, one day the right book would come along and save me. It is perhaps the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious faith.” Yet for a period after being hospitalized, Chihaya found herself unable to read.
The compelling title of her memoir comes from a recent realization that her “relationship to books has become, or perhaps has always been, an uncomfortable but necessary vacillation between love and terror—between bibliophilia and bibliophobia.” She tells her life story through this prism in artful prose, beginning with a lengthy list of meaningful texts, which range from Tana French’s The Secret Place (which she read in the hospital) and The Joan Baez Songbook to Balzac and Virginia Woolf.
Born in Canada and of Japanese descent, Chihaya felt out of place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where her family moved. Her father was depressed, “scary and always unpredictable,” and the first books she remembers reading were the Anne of Green Gables series. In high school, when assigned Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, she realized, “My encounter with the novel made it harder to maintain my willful, pernicious blindness to the way that people saw me—and the way they talked about race around me—that I’d cultivated for so long.” On a lighter note, she read Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” every day during a breakup, and calls it “indisputably the greatest breakup poem ever written,” adding, “Don’t try to argue with me on this.”
Chihaya is a probing, entertaining narrator who dissects her mental illness with poignant insights and, eventually, a degree of hope: “I cannot in good conscience tell you that I have totally let go of either the suicide plot or the reading-for-salvation plot—for what is this book if not a version of that? But these are no longer the only possible outcomes.” Brave and perceptive, Bibliophobia is equal parts astute literary analysis and moving memoir.
