Bibliophobia

Starred review from December 2, 2024
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. Agent: Hafizah Geter, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.