Sarah Chihaya’s memoir Bibliophobia begins in a hospital when she is in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and she wastes no time telling us what caused it: “Reader, it was the books that did it.” For Chihaya, reading has always meant trouble: “Sadness and reading, self-harm and writing, are the violent lifelong habits that made me who I am. For me, being a depressed person and being a reader-writer are knotted up in each other all the way back to the beginning.” She writes about her relationship with books as “an uncomfortable but necessary vacillation between love and terror—between bibliophilia and bibliophobia.”
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