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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk
I think Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia (Random House, 2025) is the first book published in 2025 that I am here to review and what an excellent one to start this year of publications off. What a gut punch and what a complex rendering of what it means to both love and fear books. Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “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?”
I overlapped briefly with Chihaya in an online reading group. Though we didn’t have substantive time to interact, at that time, Chihaya was at Princeton as an Assistant Professor. This book clarifies some of the things that have happened since, while situating the ways in which Chihaya interfaces with books, especially from the perspective of someone who has dealt with depression for a good portion of her life. Each chapter has at least one major book that anchors its meditations. The first is perhaps structurally the most important, as the memoir has a kind of en medias res quality. We know that Chihaya has experienced a nervous breakdown. In the wake of that event, she, though once consuming books voraciously, finds that she cannot read. What ensues after this chapter is the exploration of different books that have been formative for Chihaya’s life. The “life ruiner” chapter is obviously one of the best, but all show a level of verve and vulnerability that make for the best memoirs. Another chapter explores Chihaya’s relationship to the Anne of Green Gables series, while another considers Anne Carson’s long poem “The “Glass Essay,” and how Chihaya turns to this work in the wake of a breakup. Another chapter foregrounds the centrality of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, while yet another, perhaps my favorite given my own scholarly interests, covers Chihaya’s experiences with Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. As Chihaya grapples more directly with depression and suicidal ideation, other publications come to the fore, including another one of my favorites, Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I write to You in Your Life. I recalled thinking how little I know about authors, especially when they step out in front of their characters. Chihaya drops a lot of deep insights on this text, particularly for readers, who may sometimes put too much emphasis on how their own lives are directly connected to the things they read. Chihaya reminds us that there are crucial separations to make, that we of course aren’t characters nor are the people who populate our lives, and that our lives are not meant to be understood as plots inasmuch as plots aren’t supposed to be understood as lives. These nuggets may seem obvious to many, but for those who come to rely on books as something akin to “friends,” Chihaya’s memoir is both revelatory and prescriptive. Though a shadow book seems to haunt this one—the apparent first scholarly monograph that is supposed to “save” one’s professional life that Chihaha never completes—what I can tell Chihaya is that such a book may not have changed the “plot” anyway, as I can attest from the position of someone who did publish a book and got denied tenure anyway. Whatever the case, the last thing that the book leaves us all with is that complicated question: what separates scholarship from creative work, especially of the nonfictional variety? Is it the number of citations? Is it the semblance of objectivity, which we all know is a false one? Chihaya herself provides an excerpt from that shadow academic book, and I laughed out loud when she reveals her own good feelings for consigning that section to a footnote in this memoir. Yet one can’t help but wonder if the shadow book is really this one and this book is the one that should have been more than enough for any academic program, whether in the Ivy League or anywhere else. Indeed, Chihaya, though seemingly covering a different topic (concerning de-narrativization), has necessarily written a book that is hardly linear in its manifestation and one that only accrues deeper richness on re-reads. If anything, Chihaya would agree with us: all books worth reading are worth re-reading, and Bibliophobia certainly merits these return visits.
Buy the Book Here