Symptomatic Reading

Grace Byron reviews Sarah Chihaya’s “Bibliophobia.”

By Grace ByronFebruary 4, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

YOU CAN HEAR the subway rumbling under the psych ward. I’m not sure which train; the hospital’s around 33rd Street and 1st, so it must be near the water. Smoke curls up from a large vat across the courtyard, luminous in the blue night. The hospital rises like a factory surrounding all four sides of a small green garden. Across the way in the hundreds of blinking windows, you can see old folks in seafoam green gowns. Maybe it’s the NQRW—the yellow line, as some people say. I think that’s silly, but then again maybe that’s upholding the primacy of language over the visual.

It’s amazing I didn’t end up in the psych ward earlier. This is the common refrain of the ward as Sarah Chihaya writes in her new essay-collection-cum-memoir Bibliophobia: “It wasn’t a surprise that I ended up in the hospital. The main surprise was how long it took me to get there.” Psych ward literature often tautologizes this logic. I am in the ward because I was always going to be in the ward. Just think of the young patients in Girl, Interrupted—Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder tussling over who was the most likely to die first—or The Bell Jar’s gloomy beginning linking world events to internal chaos. There are occasional exceptions: Fine Gråbøl’s excellent What Kingdom is one of the rare books to skip all of this and just get on with the daily rhythms of the ward. Fights for privileges, requests for smoke breaks.

But throughout these works, inevitability is the refrain. The desire to run into oblivion—the ocean, the static on a TV screen, the bliss of oblivion. This is the blankness one craves so much. A respite from the daily onslaught of meaning. Life requires too much admin work. This daily drudgery is exhausting. It was this escape from language that Chihaya sought. “At first, the unit seems like a textless place,” she observes. Once she lands in the hospital, she hardly reads—just one Tana French mystery she can no longer remember the ending of.

While Chihaya’s time in the ward is one of the main threads of Bibliophobia, the essays also thread reflections on her favorite books across her time as an academic and critic. She carefully considers the books that were “Life Ruiners.” Anne of Green Gables, Possession, The Bluest Eye, Anne Carson, the DSM, A Tale for the Time Being, Yiyun Li, and The Last Samurai are among the trove Chihaya traverses. Through reading these books—these texts—she works to understand how words came to overwhelm her (the titular bibliophobia) and led her to the psych ward. She briefly explores her upbringing as the daughter of a Japanese family who came to New York by way of Canada. Growing up, the psych ward was for white people—people who had the privilege to have a breakdown. Until the night Chihaya lies down in the snow and falls asleep.

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Dissociating is not the sign of a well-rested individual. When the writer Jenny Diski goes searching for the endless white in Antarctica, we know she is also avoiding memories of her mother. By the time I landed in the ward, I was often nonresponsive. Instead of talking about my feelings, I read. I asked my friend to bring me books. I ask for copies of n+1 and The Drift, Middlemarch, a science book about moss. They advise me to read something more fun. The words stream through me, a torrential flood of ache. I imagine I can read my way out of sadness. I make it halfway through Middlemarch again.

Blankness is not the succor we think. Like Chihaya, I have had to relearn how to read. It is a naive fault of mine: to skim. I struggle to let texts penetrate me—I have often been on the hunt for a new Life Ruiner. I, too, was a “self-harm hobbyist.” Whether enduring conversion therapy or counseling for sexual assault or just being home for the holidays, I turned to books as a salve. The more absorbing the better. I read Bleak House, Palmares, and The Lord of the Rings this way.

One of the other girls comes to my room on the psych floor after an activity session and asks me if she can borrow a book. She knows I’m always reading. I hand her a book by Calvino I can’t get through.

“It’s about science,” I say. “And art. It’s fiction. I don’t know.”

She nods. She asks me my pronouns. I cringe and then try to unclench my jaw.

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Chihaya waits for a book to save her. It’s her childhood creation myth—that a book could be a savior. After reading such a book, her life will begin. Meanwhile, she grows up. Worries her life is actually plotless, boring, uninteresting. Bibliophobia is her symptom; the fear around books ending, starting, offering too much or not enough. The definition of bibliophobia is malleable—the feeling is not. It ranges from a “totemic” attachment to a certain edition of a book to fear surrounding not finishing a book in a certain amount of time.

Of course, for Chihaya, bibliophobia is also the fear of her own book. Not the one the reader is encountering, but an academia text she must finish to secure tenure-track. It was unfinishable. A shell filled with smoke. All writers have encountered this horrible feeling at one time or another. But it consumes Chihaya and leads to a long spell without any reading of any kind.

Only after staying with her friend and fellow critic Merve Emre, and discovering Helen DeWitt, is Chihaya able to repair her ability to read. She realizes she “was always reading for something: first, for comfort, for pleasure, for validation, for comprehension; later, for symptoms, for ideas, for citation, for tenure. And always, secretly, for salvation.” Only through going back to the basics—the admittedly intense and labyrinthian novel The Last Samurai—is Chihaya able to start again with the beginner’s mind. Life is not a text, not one that can be read for clues in the same way a novel offers itself up to us like a flower—to be picked. DeWitt’s characters, a precocious child and a depressed mother, offer Chihaya the twins of reading: the cynic and the fantasist. Which one she relates to shifts across the course of her memoir.

For most of the narrative, Chihaya feels herself to be disintegrating—someone who things happen to, not someone who takes action. She glosses Anne of Green Gables as someone she can’t relate to even if the reader may feel suspicious of such a claim. It’s “an ugly duckling story” about someone without much of a personality who recedes into the background once other characters overtake the series. Books, in the same way, come to stand in for Chihaya’s life development. Their characters, their textures. Her own life is a vehicle that allows for meditations on the texts that haunt her. In this way, it is not dissimilar to Patti Smith’s dreamy M Train or Annie Dillard’s rigorous Living by Fiction—though those books offer the opposite extremes of this genre of writing through books.

For Chihaya, understanding the exact dimensions of her sorrow is less important than moving through them. The narrative must go on. Motive is always suspect for the memoirist who has read enough memoirs and fears becoming the smug self-explainer. When she confronts her father’s rage, she doesn’t “know how to be angry anymore at this vulnerable stranger. And if not anger, I don’t know what to feel.” Her parents, “like many immigrants of their generation,” didn’t believe in “mental health.” Her sadness becomes hers alone to bear. “My central flaw is a sadness that seems to come from nowhere and cannot be stopped from spreading and corrupting everything it touches.”

This is the core of depression. It can have precedent or inciting incidents, but it is gutting precisely because it is not based on fixed conditions. Like a jump scare, it can come at any time.

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Here is an incomplete list of my own Life Ruiners: A Wrinkle in Time; Revelations; Teaching to Transgress; Franny and Zooey; Holy the Firm; My Antonia; The God of Small Things; After Henry; The Pleasure of the Text; Beloved; The Earthsea Cycle; Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”; Skating to Antarctica; trans girl suicide museum; Close to the Knives; Detransition, Baby; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Home Cooking; When Things Fall Apart.

As we collect our breakfast trays, I notice the girl who asked me for a book is in a dressing gown. I walk over to her to see why she isn’t in street clothes. Most people earned that privilege after only a day or two. She’d already been in street clothes by the time we met. I figured that could only mean one thing—a slip back into self-harm territory.

“What happened?” I ask. A nurse hovers next to her.

“They caught me. Back to square one,” she tries to laugh but thinks better of it, brushes the sound aside like a stray cat.

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The author’s isolation closes in on her from many directions. It was easy to feel connected to the Japanese community around her in Canada, where most of her family lived. Once she moved to the United States, she no longer had the same cultural connection to those around her. Her family had not lived in the States during the internment camps. Chihaya writes about the triangulation of identification with skilled precision.

In high school, Chihaya reads Toni Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye. The circumstances in which she initially discovered the book grew hazy, but it was “a book [she] couldn’t escape from.” Pecola Breedlove, the young Black girl at the center of the book, longs to have the titular blue eyes. “To say that I ‘identified’ with Pecola is not only reductive, but self-dramatizing. […] But nonetheless, I felt something in Pecola, a profound recognition that I experienced as too real and very dangerous.” Chihaya dovetails into an exploration of her own past self-harm: “We […] all believed that the body was as perfectible as the future.” A stirring revelation that launches into an exploration of growing up othered by her peers—the cost of “white adjacency.” Casual racism, micro- and macroaggressions, slurs, the gamut—from Canada to the US. Morrison’s exploration of race and beauty standards offered a mirror—even if it at a slant. This reading is characteristic of Chihaya’s bright personal criticism, an ability to examine texts gently without claiming them as entirely her own. Her prose crackles with curious expressions during this reflection before snapping back into the analytic mindset of the scholar, turning to the literature that has made and unmasked her. Sometimes this feels like hiding behind a book, The Book even. But there’s a marvelous quality to the fragments of personal narration that anchor the chapters across the book, little gems of daily moments imbued with catharsis.

The Bluest Eye is Chihaya’s Life Ruiner. “It’s the book that will not let you go.” Looking back, she can see “the taut web that connected all [her] harmful practices of survival.” Like many of the books Chihaya’s obsessed with, Morrison’s plays games with language. The book begins and ends with frantic, avant-garde scramblings of Dick and Jane. A. S. Byatt’s Possession, the next book Chihaya uncovers, is about the pursuit of textual analysis and academic misreadings. The Last Samurai features numerous passages of math, Arabic, pastiche, and Japanese. “How important it is,” Chihaya writes, “to read a book that so undoes you that it becomes a precious token of your own destruction to carry to the end of your days.”

Reading becomes an obsession for her: “I was a voracious reader, but in that thoughtless, gobbling mode that Brecht calls ‘culinary.’” Life, too, becomes a text—one that Chihaya believed she could divine through reading the daily movements of friends, lovers, and family. Even her own life seemed predictable. This, too, can be a symptom of depression—beginning to read everything as a sign of impending doom. That all roads lead to the same old private grief. That things cannot be otherwise.

This can make for the kinds of misinformed, zany readings that many undergrads—including Chihaya—make. Novelty for novelty’s sake, random sources or quotations for the simple act of rebellion, strong readings over researched ones. This can be an art, certainly, but Chihaya points out that this led to missing things in the text. Only rereading years later was she able to see things she had missed when she was reading merely to get to the end, to find support for a preconceived point. Reading for a point rarely allows one to breathe alongside instead of inside a text. While reading Anne Carson, Chihaya imagines herself to be Carson even as she imagines herself to be Emily Brontë. Later, while reading the DSM, she experiences another kind of identification—one more directly symptomatic.

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The nurses keep pushing me to do more group activities, like I’m 12. But I soften when I walk down the hallway and see a large woman wearing a Maya Deren T-shirt at the meds station. She’s just come out from ECT. “I like your shirt,” I say. Afraid to interact further, I squeak off after she thanks me. It’s breakfast time and we run through the stale coffee quickly.

Time alone was discouraged. We were “asked” to do “group.” Somehow the nurse always missed the few obligatory meetings I went to, so she thought I was always reading in my room. She didn’t think it was as funny as I did. (“[T]he hospital is not a funny place,” Chihaya writes.) We were not allowed to shave alone in the shower, so I simply did not shave my legs for a few weeks. I did not want to be so vulnerable in front of the changing vanguard of nurses who I sometimes felt were vaguely hostile. Besides, I craved my brief alone time, listening to the newly released SZA album.

For so long, I’d been telling myself a story about the psych ward. I told myself “Not yet. Wait. It will get worse.” I thought going to the ward would say something about me—that it would both validate and destroy me. I couldn’t afford to stop working; I couldn’t afford to stop the world. But eventually I had no choice. There was a small intervention from friends who asked me to consider checking myself in. I obliged after realizing I couldn’t go very long without wanting to be dead. I was having daily anxiety attacks and lying in bed nonresponsive while those friends took turns on suicide watch. I didn’t even look at my phone—a sure sign of something being wrong. The preceding years had been difficult, a whirlwind of collapse. A difficult breakup, COVID-19 and housing insecurity, losing my job, developing agoraphobia, a pneumothorax, self-harm and eating disorder relapses, my father nearly dying. But none of that broke me. It was only a few years later when the anxiety attacks increased that I decided it was time to “give myself a break.” Only after things got better did I give myself the bizarre luxury of even more intense suicidal ideation.

I thought I was uniquely fucked up. Alone. That my story was singular and allowed me my bitterness. And in some ways, it is and it does. In other ways, I’m reminded of Chihaya’s words: “I was not special, the DSM told me, nor did I have to be special in order to be officially fucked up, and that realization was an incredible relief.”

The psych ward gave me the ability to see this: I was not special, I was not alone. It was just another part of the human condition. People shuffling to and from ECT, surgical gowns, med time, coloring pages, a difficulty enduring the cruelty of the world, a flirtation with death.

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Who owns a story? Once you’ve written something and published it, you open yourself up to many levels of reading—including those in bad faith. Chihaya marvels at her past misreadings both of life and literature. The way language can never fully contain the wilderness of life. (Her chapter on Ruth Ozeki is full of stuff—many lists that attempt to build the all-encompassing book, the book of salvation.) “Life as narrative structure” fails her. This OCD approach to life is deeply familiar to me. The attempt to make a list, to find the talismanic object to break free from the numbing pain. It is difficult to give up the suicide plot once it enters your mind—even passively. It hangs there like Chekhov’s gun. “Imagine the book that solves all your problems,” Chihaya writes. Put another way: Imagine the unthinkable action.

There is, of course, no real conclusion to Bibliophobia. How could there be? Instead she ends with an I Ching reading from a friend: “The rain will come in its own time.” The hexagram in question: wait. The only way through, unfortunately, is through.