Random House Publishing Group
Search
Expand Mobile Menu
Bibliophobia

Bibliophobia

A Memoir

About the Book

“A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“A must for the obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot

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?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.
Read more
Close

Praise for Bibliophobia

“A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“Bibliophobia gave me, well . . . bibliophobia. Sarah Chihaya has written a book that’s so wise, so funny, so understanding of all the layering foibles and tragedies that can form a person, that by the end, I held the book with a feeling of awe.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

“Bibliophobia feels like the first book I have ever read that accords the correct (massive) weight to the role of books in my own life, reminding me how high the stakes were when I first fell in love with reading, and restoring to me the sense that books are still a matter of life and death. At once a radical analysis of the relationship between reading, writing, and suicide, and a case study in how seemingly unnarratable and overwhelming experience can be transformed into a transcendent book. A must for any obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, Either/Or, and Possessed

“Reading Bibliophobia is like having a deep and intimate conversation with a kindred lover of literature: The world may not become better, but in this conversation we each become less isolated and lonely.”—Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

“A beautiful, rapturous, and darkly funny meditation on the mutual ruin, love, haunting, heartbreak, betrayal, fear, and dependence that we share with the books that wreck and redeem our lives.”—Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows

“An instant classic. This heady, confiding memoir offers a refreshingly nuanced take on what books do to us. Sarah Chihaya has done something remarkable: written a book about losing yourself in books that you can lose yourself in.”—Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep

“Sarah Chihaya is funny, subtle, and—particularly when writing about her own life—as sharp as cut glass.”—Andrea Long Chu, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York magazine critic

“Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya’s plaintive debut. Evocative and astute . . . her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful. The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Read more
Close

About the Author

Sarah Chihaya
Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn. More by Sarah Chihaya
Decorative Carat

By clicking submit, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime.

Random House Publishing Group