Sarah Chihaya, author of Bibliophobia: A Memoir (Random House, 2025), gives us an intensely personal examination of reading, writing, and thinking about the ways books allow us to explore how and why we define ourselves. Chihaya’s masterful storytelling weaves books and literary criticism throughout her memoir in essays. Alternately beautiful and painful, Chihaya illuminates the ways she delved into and navigated her life, battling depression and loneliness. Told with humor, her writing seeks to create a space that asks readers to examine the books they seek and devour, and to question why they have chosen them. Chihaya was awarded the prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for this work that blends literary criticism with memoir, a unique presence on the literary landscape.
I spoke with Chihaya via Zoom about her book, her intentional life, and her desire to create a space of connection between books and their readers.
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The Rumpus: When did you begin writing Bibliophobia, in earnest?
Sarah Chihaya: I’d never planned to write a memoir, but I’ve been curious about the ways other people write about their lives. When I was in academia, I used to joke around with students and colleagues, saying that a lot of academic study is actually memoir, masquerading as scholarship. You can really see what people are preoccupied with and what they’re made of. Even when I was a scholar, I was not a great fit for that profession because the personal kept wanting to be more of the work. For instance, when I was reading academic books for Bibliophobia, I found myself constantly being overtaken by intrusive thoughts, like: “I should be doing my work, but instead I want to write this other thing.”
When I started writing Bibliophobia, I thought it would be like The Ferrante Letters [a collaboration in collective criticism], which is really an academic book. I imagined a book that explored the idea of reading, consisting of a series of close readings designed for specialists. However, I also wanted it to be for all people who are careful readers. Initially, when I was still working as a professor, I imagined it as a series of critical essays because, in my mind that was the way it could count academically, but it would also exorcise this part of myself that I’d been wanting to write about: the story of what happened to me when I went to the psychiatric hospital. That story was partially bound up in my career of being an academic and explaining to people why I hadn’t written my dissertation as a book.
However, I quickly realized that Bibliophobia was not going to go that way. I also realized that to write about the way I read, I also had to write about the way I lived. These are inextricable. So Bibliophobia as a purely intellectual project was a delusion. There is no such thing as a purely intellectual project. For many of us, every intellectual project is also an emotional project.
Rumpus: Is your book accessible because you were able to marry the literary criticism to an examination of your life?
Chihaya: That’s what I was hoping for. Although I started off with these kinds of intellectual ambitions, I also wanted everyone who reads and who really loves reading to also feel a bit afraid of it, pushed by it. Able to relate to that tension.
Rumpus: You write about some really heavy topics—mental health, depression, suicide ideation, among others—but you’re able to include humor and wit. How were you able to add humor to such heavy topics?
Chihaya: In some ways, in literature and film, there is no greater crime than humorlessness because it’s really inaccurate. Even the direst of circumstances have humor, even if it’s the darkest humor there is. There has to be humor in order to keep going, and we still find things funny in the darkest of times, right? When my father passed away last spring and we were planning his funeral, my family found things to laugh about. Stories about him that were the funny, ridiculous things he did or said, or habits he had. Things we could not separate from feelings of sadness. In fact, humor can make sadness more poignant. The things that brought you joy that are gone, and you’re remembering a shadow of past happiness. That can be the most poignant thing.
There was never a question in my mind that Bibliophobia would be a funny book, even when I was writing it. When we’re talking about extremely serious matters, extremely dark matters, they have to be somehow leavened, usually by something absurd that happens. I don’t personally respond well to unrelentingly sad books. There has to be a whisper of humor, even if it’s horrible. You might even think, “I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but I am.” For the writer, that’s the greatest compliment: to have someone say, “Oh, your book made me cry, but it also made me laugh sometimes.” That’s life. Life is not just one feeling, it is every feeling at once. Humor is something that makes you feel more than you felt before.
Rumpus: You distilled a lot into two hundred pages. What was your process of planting and cultivating the seed into this book? How did you decide what to keep, and what to get rid of? How did you organize this information?
Chihaya: The book starts in a very complex way, which is how the project started—with the experience of being in a psychiatric hospital, leaving the hospital, and everything that came after that. It started with that narrative. I still think of myself as an essayist, but as a single book, it holds together tightly, unlike the Ferrante book, which is a series of essays written together in collaboration with friends, then transformed into a book.
Initially, I didn’t like the idea of writing the book. As an academic, I’ve been struggling with writing something longer than an article for what felt like my whole life, or since I was in grad school. So, I thought of this book as little narrative chunks, like stories you’re telling a friend.
The chapter entitled “Peering” was the only piece published before I sold the book. You can really see the discrete shape of the chapter. It extends outwards because of some of the revisions I made, but it fits together as just one story. Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay,” which is the text at this chapter’s heart, is about a breakup, but it is also about getting so involved in reading that the work begins to describe the reader’s life. I read and reread that poem to try to get a glimpse of myself. Like the poem, I wanted things to begin and end neatly, and they don’t. Every chapter in Bibliophobia is like that, examining the messiness of life, creating a new character that could stand in for me, finding a text from which I sought answers.
The chapter entitled, “A Tale for the Nonbeing” was the hardest to organize, to figure out what would go in it. I think of it as kind of a “bagginess” test—how much could that chapter hold? The chapter didn’t have a discrete start and stop. I’ve wrestled for many years with Ruth Ozeki’s book A Tale for the Time Being. I’ve taught it, I’ve written about it academically. When I was writing Bibliophobia, I wrote that chapter probably five times, and in the end, I decided it had to be a weird shape because it was not a start-and-stop kind of a story.
Every chapter in Bibliophobia plays a function. Each is like a little seasonal episode. You can read them separately. You can start and stop and put down the book and then pick it up and be like, “Oh, this is the next sort of movement.” But each chapter can be read as a stand-alone as well. Organizing it in this way helped me with the project. It helped with keeping the project contained. I was very afraid that I would start writing and the book would expand outward and become just another book that I would never finish, and it would just keep going, so telling myself, “I’m going to write thirty pages of this book, or this section of my life, on this person, on this time. . . .” really helped me keep disciplined in my writing, and keep it as contained as it could be.
I wanted to make sure, through all its different forms, each chapter retained that quality of asking questions we don’t let ourselves ask very often. There’s a model of memoir, or family history, that says, “We always have to dig further.” But, in “A Tale for Nonbeing,” I didn’t want to actively dig further. I also didn’t want to dodge responsibility. I didn’t want to go to Japan, do the research, find these family members that I’ve never felt related to. Instead, I wanted to write a book about having the right to write some of that “burden of knowing.” I didn’t want to feel obligated to pursue every sort of unknown historical bit that was involved. I wanted to be able to perceive things in a different way. It was very meaningful to me to decide the limits of knowing my paternal family, because I’ve never really felt like I was part of them. I can understand that trauma exists in their history, and in some ways, that’s not my story to tell. To tell a history of their experiences would obscure the experience I had with my father. It was important for me to recognize that many family stories, especially in this country, are impossible to go back to, to feel connected to, even if you discover the historical truth. Acknowledging that feeling of not knowing where your role is in historical discovery or research is really important.
Rumpus: Writing memoir may invite people into our lives to sift through our ashes. When do you say, “Enough is enough?”
Chihaya: I thought a lot about my best friend, and also my mother, when I was writing the chapter “The Non-existent Pelt.” It’s always a risk. I didn’t want to put either of them in a position where they would feel like I’ve stolen things from them. I tried really hard to make it very clear that there was just my side of the story, which was just one part of this very complex history that all of us share in my family. I was very nervous when both of them read the book. Although I thought what I had shared about them would be okay, I wasn’t positive. It was uncertainty that made it difficult.
Sometimes, honesty requires you to say things that might hurt people. So, it was important to have Sigrid Nunez’s quote at the end of the book: “INTERVIEWER: Isn’t a writer supposed to have a sliver of ice in their heart? NUNEZ: Yes, but not for the reader.” I want people to leave the book and think about how those stories are told. I thought a lot about what it means to have a splinter of ice in your heart and be able to say what is true to you and what is true that you see about the world but not wanting to hurt people with it. I think about how writers are able to do this, but not get burned by it.
Rumpus: Who is Bibliophobia written for?
Chihaya: I used to joke with friends that it was written for people just like me: sad people. I hope it does speak to people who are having problems with depression, or with intellectual life, like I was having, but I think it’s for people who have been touched very deeply by books. When I started writing Bibliophobia, I thought about what Jane Austen said about Emma: “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” But then, as I was writing [Bibliophobia], especially as I was coming to the end of it, I found Donald Antrim’s book One Friday in April, which is about suicide and about writing. That book felt very close in some ways. It’s just one man’s story with the most personal experience you can have. It really touched me. It really moved me. I started thinking about how my book would touch people who had had that kind of experience, that feels so personal and so lonely. Anyone who has had that lonely experience with a book, where you feel like no one but you and the book understand each other. It’s for people who love books and recognize we don’t just love them in a fuzzy way.
I was trying to explain this book to an audience last summer, saying that everyone is like a stack of books: we are all made up of stories. When I was an English professor, people would often ask me what my favorite book was, or what book I loved the most. It’s an infuriatingly difficult question! What does that mean? I can like a book and read it fast, but that book doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on who I am.
I want everyone to think about what books continue to live in them, the books they can’t put down. I want people to make their own kind of lists of what books they’ve connected with, what books they can’t stop thinking about. Maybe this is sort of grandiose, but I want for us, for readers and writers, to have a more complicated conversation about what loving books means in popular culture. So often, the questions have a relentlessly positive spin: What do you read to comfort yourself or to feel good? Or what book made you a better person? But I don’t think these are the only questions about why we read, or why reading is necessary. The real questions explore why you wrestle with yourself, or what books were hard but necessary, or painful but necessary. And those can be the books you love the most. Often, I think they are.
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Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
