I Fear the Books I Read: A Reading of Bibliophobia: Bibliophobia by Chihaya, Sarah (2025),  Penguin Random House, New York,  240 pages.

Suddenly it was clear to me that books did not work on everyone the way they worked on me […] I knew in that moment that I was truly a reader, and that meant something more than I’ve ever realized: That was the identity I had been looking for this whole time. (104)

This is the second essay in the new section: “Extra-Analytic: Creative Readings.” Unlike a traditional book review, which critiques a text from the position of knowledge and expertise, here is a space that focuses on aspects of the reading experience often sidelined as marginal or additional and energizes the act of reading into a psychoanalytic endeavor.

In my first introduction to this new section, I conjured an image of the reading environment that often characterizes one’s childhood, but which tends to fall away in one’s adult life:

Think of this section like the area of a child’s room that she’s designated as the reading nook. You call out that it’s time for dinner, but she remains immersed in the mess of pages and pillows. You gently interrupt and inquire into what she’s experiencing over there. As she emerges from her reverie and tucks the book away for later, following you to the dinner table, she begins to tell you; she begins to bring you into her world.

Sarah Chihaya’s new memoir, Bibliophobia, published in February 2025 by Penguin Random House, conjures this very experience while investigating the complexities of her lifelong relationship to depression. She writes of a different version of disappearing into reading: “I wonder if my desire to dissolve into a text came from the feeling that I was already fated to undergo a process of erosion and

destruction (50).” With this question as the backdrop, her memoir charts her relationship to a mood rather than providing a tidy, chronological narrative about her nervous breakdown and how she overcame it.