Bibliophobia: A Memoir

ISBN: 059359472X

Author: Chihaya, Sarah

Condition: New

A must for the obsessive reader.-Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The IdiotA soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative (Whiting Foundation) memoir about reading, writing, and depressionBooks can seduce you.They can annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books, Sarah Chihaya thinks, has had this kind of unsettling literary encounter. She calls books that have this effect Life Ruiners.Chihayas Life Ruiner, Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school,andits electrifying treatment of race exposed her deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. Transformed, Chihaya knew shed build her life around books, searching for another Life Ruiner that could show her how to live. 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.Alternately searing and darkly humorous, Bibliophobia is a story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, and many other texts, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.