Chihaya took "we tell ourselves stories in order to live" to heart.
In all seriousness, I found this book quite moving. A memoir-in-books about reading, writing, and the narratives we construct around our lives, with an enthusiastic gloss of several key books in Chihaya's life: Morrison's The Bluest Eye, DeWitt's The Last Samurai, Byatt's Possession, Anne Carson's The Glass Essay (this chapter was particularly strong), and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being. This is a book especially concerned about the relationships a person constructs with reading, what they hope to get from books, and the act of reading as a process of writing and vice versa; the author's relationship with books and reading is also told through the lens of her life-long depression. 4.5 stars, rounded up.

Critically examining a variety of texts and the profound impacts they had on her throughout various points of her life, Sarah Chihaya has written a beautiful and fascinating exploration in her literary mental health memoir; Bibliophobia.

Perfect for avid readers and memoir lovers alike, while taking on themes such as memory, identity, belonging, time, and love. The writing and story unfolded in a compelling manner that drew me deeper into the author’s inner workings and personal experiences, many of which resonated with my own.

Thank you to NetGalley, Author Sarah Chihaya and Publisher Random House for access to a digital ARC. All opinions are my own.

This is the kind of high brow memoir that drew me in at parts while also making me feel like a total poser. It brought to mind a certain aesthetic, which the author describes at one point when she finds herself reading other writers' depression memoirs. It's a mood, right? Or is it a cliche? Relating to parts of the book made me feel almost embarrassed, as if I was trying too hard to be liked back by it. I also felt like a fraud because I haven't read many of the books Chihaya describes and so I can only take her word for it when she writes about how impactful they were/are. Part of me wanted to be like, "Ah, yes, me too. I know what you mean. I feel this too." But the best I can do is to think, "I'm glad you got so much from these books. What a feeling that is!"

Well, I’m rounding up to 3.5. One thing is certain, if you read this book, you will engage with all future books in a different deeper manner.Sarah Chihaya is honest and quite transparent about her mental illness which led to her bout of Bibliophobia, the fear of books, not literally, but the fear of engaging with texts, because when one does there is an effect. Sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Certain books and characters stay with us long after we have flipped the final page.

“A few years ago, I got very interested in the idea that everyone who is incurably obsessed with books has a Life Ruiner. The Life Ruiner is the book that sets you on the path to a life built by and around reading. To call it a Life Ruiner is not to say that a life of letters is necessarily ruination—but rather, to identify it as 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.”


And what if that staying weighs heavy on your mind, too heavy to lift off, too heavy for you to lightly approach another book. Well that’s the dark reality of Sarah’s relationship to literature which eventually led to a full on breakdown.

“I had not yet learned that there are ways to read such that books stay with you—in you—forever. I was years away from the understanding that there are certain books that modify your chemical composition so palpably you fear you might no longer breathe air or drink water. And it becomes clear that something ever so slight but important in the way you read the world is altered forever. These are the books that make us grow up or sometimes realize that we have long since grown up.”

Her prose surrounding books is really what makes this text soar, even when her writing concerning her struggles with depression threatens to derail the entire project. She manages to keep the fascination on the page in her examination of her emotions and how they shape her engagement with books.

“For better or worse, you are what you eat. The books that refuse to be easily digested, the ones that churn up anxieties and fears you never knew you had: These are the ones that have most strongly shaped my own experience of reading as an adult. Looking back, they shaped even some of my earliest and clearest memories of reading—both books and the world outside them. I’ve only recently come to see that my relationship to books has become, or perhaps has always been, an uncomfortable but necessary vacillation between love and terror—between bibliophilia and bibliophobia.”

The overbearing discussion of suicidality, is what drags it down to 3.5. It was a bit much for this reader, your tolerance may vary. With that being said, I’m still enthusiastically recommending this book. Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for an advanced DRC. The book will be available Feb. 4, 2025

A beautiful memoir told through stories of books and depression. For those of us who have lived our lives going from book to book, always looking for the one that can save us (while always hoping the next one will finally do the trick). Masterfully written and from the heart, the book is an honest portrayal of what it means to live a life through books.

“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.”

BIBLIOPHOBIA is a beautifully written memoir centered on the knowledge that books and reading have the ability to deeply and profoundly impact life and how you live it. Chihaya's writing style is clean and gorgeous - fitting for someone who seems to live and breathe the written word - and able to clearly convey the emotion tied to each of the works she is discussing in relation to her family, her job, and her depression. This is arguably not a happy book, but I don't think I would call it sad either. Mostly it feels straightforward, and definitely it's one I would recommend, especially for those who can recall with little effort the books that have really and truly changed their life.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was so touching. Reading about Chihaya's experiences and the books that effected their life was beautiful and I think a great book that people who have also had books change their lives will also love this book. I found myself reflected in the pages because as book lovers we all have books who have great effected us. The writing is beautiful and touching, Chihaya's voice shines in this novel and I can't recommend it enough

A beautifully written memoir a story about books about an almost overpowering love for books & reading,The author shares with us the story of her love for books and also the times she could not settle into a book.As a memoir we learn of her life her depression her childhood memories.As someone who related to an overwhelming love for books I loved this book from beginning to end willbe recommending to my bookworm friends.#netgalley #randomhouse

Did I just read one of the best books of 2025… in 2024? If Alexander Chee and Sylvia Plath had a Japanese Canadian/American bookworm baby, it would be Sarah Chihaya. Not-quite-a-memoir BIBLIOPHOBIA is a collection of Chihaya’s musings and analyses on her relationship with books, depression, family, and racial identity.

Chihaya’s prose is so satisfyingly clean and incisive. My favorite writers are those who know how to distill a fleeting thought, emotion, experience, or state of being into crystalline lines that rattle with sharpness. My e-ARC is littered with highlights. Some of these include:

“I was enraptured by the book itself but equally enraptured with the sense that it gave me someone to be.”

“I immediately, repeatedly reread certain passages at a word-by-word crawl, not to understand what happened, but to figure out how it was happening…”

“We indeed are all ‘by-products of the mid-twentieth century,’ as Ozeki writes, and I irrationally and grandiosely fear that like microplastics, like neo-imperial structures of power, like the internet, I too am circulating some insidious unknown poison as I move through the world.”

1. “Life Ruiners”

This book is a Life Ruiner. Chihaya feels like the kind of person I could be, want to be, don’t want to be, and/or will inevitably become. To be so astute about the experiences of reading, and yet to suffer as a result of acute astuteness… Will I get madder the closer I try to get to words?

This memoir/essay collection is titled BIBLIOPHOBIA because, as much as Chihaya’s identity and career revolve around reading and writing about books, she has a deep-seated fear of the power that books hold over her. Her fear of and attraction to “Life Ruiners” is due to that dreadful desire, that desired dread, that you are, in fact, not a unique individual, but a ghost, because all your thoughts have already been thought and said by someone else much more intelligent/reflective/successful/emotive than you.

When I first learned of this book, I joked that there was no more need for me to write a memoir, because Chihaya had unwittingly written mine for me: the story of an Asian diaspora girl with a tumultuous family, lifelong depression, and a too-complicated relationship with books. It’s true that I can no longer focus my memoir on my mental health and love of books, because Chihaya has written it much better than I ever could, and I am simultaneously impressed and aggrieved by that. This book is a Life Ruiner, indeed.

2. On depression

“That’s the annoying fact that challenges all writing about depression: It is just not a good story. It usually does not have a clearly defined beginning or ending; it’s mostly just terrible, boring middle after terrible, boring middle.”

As much as we (and, to some extent, she) know that her brain had these thoughts, and her hands wrote these words, for the longest time Chihaya couldn’t see through her depression that she was the author of her own life. I might’ve had a cry at this point. Depression really makes you feel like you are not in the driver’s seat. At the same time it is the most infuriatingly mundane thing to describe or experience ever. In Chihaya’s words:

“It is more than the dull throb–it is a dull dullness, a drained immobility that I would not have had words to explain then, as a child of seven or eight, except to say ‘I’m tired.’”

“I’m just tired.” “I’m okay.” How many times have we sufferers from depression uttered these same words as an inadequate attempt to encapsulate the neverending nothingness we feel?

3. Reading as erasure, reading as identity building

“...living as I have among books, I have been cultivating the feeling of being a ghost for a long time.”

“I alternated between being someone who was forever at the mercy of plots I had no control over, and being someone who believed they knew exactly how those plots worked: in other words, between being a character and being a critic.”

Depression as the pilot of her life meant that, for the longest time, Chihaya consumed books not just to escape–not just to try and make sense of her own identity–but to erase. Think about how much mental (depression), physical (family), and social (race) tumult one has to experience to read books not merely to escape, which implies temporariness, but to erase, which implies annihilation of the self. Devastating.

Even when she felt she was exerting control over her life–Chihaya-as-critic and not Chihaya-as-character–she still did not believe that she was Chihaya-as-author. This metaphor of depression’s hold on one’s thoughts means that when Chihaya discovers that there is a life beyond the finality of suicidality:

“When the time came, and I asked for help, nobody was more shocked than I. It was like I’d turned to the end of a book I’d read a hundred times and found that somehow the words had changed–or rather, that I myself had unwittingly rewritten them.”

When you’re depressed, life seems to have no beginning or end. Nothingness has no beginning or end; it was all that there was, is, and will be. Chihaya’s complicated relationship with books begins to make sense if you understand how a depressed person’s mind works.

4. On race, family, & trauma

“Nervous breakdown was not for the children of immigrants.”

One thing I love about this next generation of Asian (American) writers is that their race forms part, but not all, of their identity and struggles, which is a more honest and liberating perspective. In BIBLIOPHOBIA, Chihaya’s struggles with her depression were compounded by the fact that she came from a familial culture for which mental health isn’t really a thing. Many of us children of Asian immigrants can relate to this struggle between the American openness about therapy and mental health and the Asian silence on the topic. It can make the experience of being depressed even more isolating and out-of-body, if our families are one of those that don’t talk about mental health issues. In such a case, the silence feels like gaslighting: Am I really depressed if no one around me acknowledges it? Am I simply weak because I cannot convince my brain to stop feeling this way, when everyone around me is “fine”?

Casual childhood abuse is also something that Chihaya writes about with chilling insightfulness. “I grew up in a series of houses that were always about to slide off a cliff”, she says. On recalling her father’s temper:

“I still feel it involuntarily in my body now. My fingers, resting on the keyboard, are suddenly cold. A chill thread tugs upward through my spine, snagging and gathering nerves as it goes. There is a slight, irregular flutter somewhere deep inside my chest. The curved outer rims of my ears ache weirdly like someone is pulling up on them.”

Powerful, and accurate.

5. Not quite a memoir, and quite a bit more

BIBLIOPHOBIA is titled a memoir, but Chihaya would be the first one to tell you that it has only the loosest bearing on one. This is because Chihaya doesn’t recall or recount experiences in chronological order; her memory, she says, doesn’t work like that, instead storing things such as feelings and textures. There’s a fair amount of literary analysis that reads quite academic (she is a literature professor, after all). I’ll admit I enjoyed the vulnerable moments when she shared about herself more than the literary analysis parts, but can see why both parts are needed and build on one another.

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The book that Chihaya didn’t (couldn’t?) write before this one, the one she needed to have written to earn her PhD, focuses on the academic concept she terms “denarrative desire.” This is the simultaneous feeling that all will be well if only you reach the end of the book, and the desire to erase what you have just read in order to read it again to experience it (differently?). Having finished BIBLIOPHOBIA, I certainly now have the denarrative desire to immediately experience it again. If we’re talking about books that alter my brain chemistry, then BIBLIOPHOBIA is certainly one, and I can’t thank Sarah Chihaya enough for being brave and vulnerable enough to share this with us.

"Bibliophobia" is well written and interesting, in particular for people who love books. As a memoir, it deals with the author's experience of feeling like an outsider, as well as with her experiences of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. Some literary connections work better than others; there are books she refers to that are jarring, and don't seem to fit as well within the narrative. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for the ARC. Pub Date: Feb 4, 2025. #Bibliophobia

Such a beautifully written work, I couldn’t stop highlighting! The author handled each topic with candor and responsibility, a unique feat when it comes to mental health, disordered eating, and self harm.

The premise of this novel was so interesting to me as someone who loves books and connects certain books to certain periods of my life as well. I couldn't connect with Chihaya, unfortunately, even though I really wanted to identify with the author. Chihaya brought up several traumatic events, but it felt like it was for shock value and not as context for the memoir as it tended to stay surface level, and I had a hard time following how the literary works connected with Chihaya personally at different points throughout Bibliophobia.

I absolutely loved this book, I hesitate to give it a starred rating as it is a memoir, but suffice to say there are paragraphs and lines that resonated with me. I would say that if you're going to read it definitely get it in print, as some of the e-book formatting is a little wonky, at least with my font settings. If you've ever read for escape, for purpose rather than pleasure I cannot stress how important this book is. Especially if you're also on the journey of learning to read without expectations.