BIBLIOPHOBIA

Though she attempted suicide three times between the ages of 10 and 18, Chihaya writes, “One thing I was pretty sure about [the term] ‘nervous breakdown’ was that it was not for people like me.” The child of a Japanese immigrant and a Japanese Canadian woman who “didn’t really believe in the concept of mental health,” she diagnosed her adult self as “a self-harm hobbyist, a casual insomniac, and a nonchalant bulimic,” rather than someone seriously distressed. Dark humor like this slightly leavens the grim mood as Chihaya delineates her intense and in her judgment often harmful relationship with books. “I was always reading for something,” she comments, “for validation, for comprehension…and always, secretly, for salvation.” Only after her inability to write the academic monograph required for academic tenure prompted a full-fledged collapse was she forced to acknowledge her precarious emotional state. Her probing and wrenchingly honest memoir looks back on books that affected her powerfully in various ways, from Toni Morrison’s terrifying The Bluest Eye, which voiced her teenage fears of failing to measure up to “all the provinces of whiteness,” to Ruth Ozeki’s reassuring A Tale for the Time Being, read while she was an anxious assistant professor, which “kicked up my faith in a book that could save me.” At times, Chihaya’s analysis of the effect certain books had on her is so minute it becomes wearying, and her many definitions of bibliophobia—“acute, literal fear of books,” “violent fits of melancholy and resentment after finishing a book,” “superstitious fear of incompletion,” and more—make her explanation that “bibliophobia is many things” seem like nervous justification. Nonetheless, she offers an intriguing alternate view of passionate reading, and the closing pages movingly describe Chihaya coming to terms with the fact that she will always be a suicide risk. The book offers more than some readers will want to know, but it’s probing and wrenchingly honest.