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”. Chihaya 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?
Stirring and sparkling ... Sharp, sad ... A representative quip — funny, brutal — in a book that could have easily lapsed into sentimentality or cliché. Bibliophobia tackles topics that lend themselves readily to treacly treatment — suicidal ideation, familial turmoil, heartbreak, eating disorders, cutting, the gray haze of depression — but the prose is too precise for baggy self-indulgence.
Chihaya rejects this kind of faith-based relationship to books ... Broadens, deepens, and disturbs our sense of reading’s risks. For Chihaya, the danger does not lie in the content of books but in her way of relating to them ... A book of paradoxes. It’s a profoundly satisfying book about the maddening inadequacy of books.
Chihaya...scrutinizes books in which she found great pleasure, unraveling the harmful lessons she clung to long after reading them ... A pitfall of the biblio-memoir is that reading about other people’s experiences of reading can be a bit like reading about other people’s dreams. Although Bibliophobia is never academic, it is often abstract ... It is a reminder that instead of searching for a story that explains everything, we might do well to embrace the uncertainty of the unwritten pages still before us.
