Bibliophobia

A Memoir

By: Sarah Chihaya

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

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

A "soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative"* memoir about reading, writing, and depression (Whiting Foundation)

"Bibliophobia: occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books, though more frequently develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound—perhaps too profound—attachments to books and literature… You may have bibliophobia if you frequently experience intense reactions to books that somehow act on you, or activate you, in ways that you suspect are unhealthy or hurtful—or at times, simply bad for you. And yet, they are necessary; you would not be you without them.”

Have you ever read a book and felt so gutted by it that you knew you’d never recover? That it made you sit differently in your own skin? A book that complicated everything you believed in and changed the way you read the world around you forever? This is what Sarah Chihaya calls a “Life Ruiner”. Sarah’s Life Ruiner was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. When she read it in her high school English class, she could no longer pretend not to notice how alien she felt as a Japanese American in a predominantly White suburb of Cleveland. Shaken, she set out on a quest—for the book that would show her who she was and how to live in an inhospitable world.

There were lots of scripts available, and she tried to follow them—skinny athlete, angsty artist, ambitious academic. But a lifelong struggle with depression thwarted the resolution to every plot, and when she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question: can we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Alternately searing and laugh-out-loud funny, Bibliophobia is a deft combination of memoir and criticism in the vein of Geoff Dyer and Olivia Laing. Through a series of books, including The Bluest Eye, Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, and The Last Samurai, Sarah Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the necessary and painful ways that books can push back on the readers who love them.

©2025 Sarah Chihaya (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

“A moving account of the experience of loving, fearing, and resenting literature, written with the authority of a trained specialist and the solicitude of an amateur. Sarah Chihaya is funny, subtle, and—particularly when writing about her own life—as sharp as cut glass. Whether reflecting on a Toni Morrison novel or flipping through the oldest book in the world, Chihaya refuses to bracket herself out. She is always there alongside us, patient and generous but never doing us the disservice of protecting us from the text. It is there, and she is there too: that is enough. If you hate books the way I do, this one you’ll love.”—Andrea Long Chu, New York Magazine critic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize