When I think about reading, I think about a kind of hunger that only exists in my memory. As a child, I did not think about time or food or my physical body or even where I was, really, while reading. I devoured books in a way that now seems almost mythical, with a fullness of attention I find difficult to summon for anything these days.
I used to think of this hunger as love––until I read Sarah Chihaya’s memoir Bibliophobia, in which she describes the titular condition as occurring “when someone has, crudely stated, loved books to a dangerous degree.” In her memoir, Chihaya artfully unpacks the different ways our consumption of books can nourish or poison us, offer a refuge, a mirror, or fundamentally change who we are. Some books even ask us to revise the narratives of ourselves and our lives with an intensity that can feel almost like violence.
Chihaya pairs moments of deep personal upheaval, like a nervous breakdown that leaves her unable to read for a time, with an examination of books that she terms “Life Ruiners,” demonstrating the ways that books are inextricably linked to her life, self-perception, and the ways she learns to read others. In incisive and lively prose, Chihaya makes space to ask questions about the ways that reading can provoke questions about the wider world: Where is the line between loving something and losing yourself in it? What separates creation from destruction, and is there really ever a way to disentangle the two? What nourishes and what poisons? And what happens when we are drawn to consume a text that nurtures and harms us at the same time?
I had the opportunity to speak with Sarah Chihaya about the relationship between reading and academia, the way disruptive forces can lead to creation, and how she sees herself as a reader now.
Jacqueline Alnes: In addition to all the reasons we love books, I love how you write about the way they can be a disruptive force and encourage us to hold a mirror up to ourselves. Books can be something we avoid, at times, because there is something in them we don’t want to engage with. What was it like to unpack these different ways that books are in our lives?
Sarah Chihaya: Books are not always black or white––they are always in a grey zone, and that is something we should celebrate about them. If we knew what they were supposed to tell us or how we were supposed to unpack them, it would be a dull enterprise to read. Getting into that middle, that in-between space, was very hard. It’s still hard to think back on childhood reading, this magical experience of encountering books, and separate that from this more complicated feeling. I thought a lot about teaching while I was writing this book because so much of teaching is helping students put words to that feeling of not knowing how to respond to a book.
The books that stay with me the longest are the ones that have made me the most uncomfortable. It’s not just discomfort, it’s this kind of excitement. It’s being uncomfortable with that fact of confrontation, of having to look at the thing and ask yourself why this makes me unsettled or stressed or whatever it does to you. It’s being uncomfortable with yourself. It’s both the thing itself and the act of looking that is hard. My hope for this book is that it encourages readers to do this on their own and come away interrogating their own reading habits and thinking about why certain books stay with them, why they are troubled by certain books, and why they can’t finish certain books.
JA: The way you bring up the relationship between academia and reading, the way that it feels like a double-edged sword, is interesting. At first, in your memoir, reading is a space where you find confidence and validation. Later, it becomes a stressor, a pressure to participate in a way that no longer feels like that ravenous, childhood form of reading—it’s more of a “Where is your conference paper?” then “Where is your chapter?” form of engagement. I wondered if you could talk about that relationship.
SC: I think every academic has some version of this, where there is a sense that there was a real kind of reading you did that grows less and less accessible and grows less and less rewarded by the academy. There is a line in A.S. Byatt’s Possession where the two main characters talk about why they study what they study—they say something about how it’s what survived their education. I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s kind of a funny line, to think you go back to the things that survived this process of being formed, but it’s also very sad. There is something tragic about education being this war that you have to survive in order to come out the other end and work on something and be productive.
I reached this point where I did not read novels any more because I thought, if I read this, I’ll have to write about it.
When I was a scholar, I worked on Contemporary Literature and I reached this point where I just did not read novels any more because I thought, if I read this, I’ll have to write about it. That feeling of dread that you would be responsible is an unfair burden to put on the text because you are saying if I read you, book, you have to do something for me because it will be professionally expedient. It’s a pressure on yourself to make something. You can’t just let a book be itself. You are always privileging the self over the book because you have to make something that will contribute to your career. So often, in the academy, we are told who you are is what you make and productivity equals your personality. Even if it’s a book you love, a book you have really felt passionately about, you still feel the need to make it your own, in a way. It was hard to disentangle from that mode of reading and I’m still working on it. It’s a work in process, but I’ve found it very rewarding to try to be less productive, if that makes sense.
JA: Your book made me think about that moment when my students come into class just excited to talk about a reading. It made me wonder: Do you think our relationship to reading necessarily has to evolve because we all get older and become part of, as you say in your memoir, a world where microplastics are in everything and many of us are part of different insidious systems? Do you feel like it’s possible to retain that initial pleasure while reading or is it something we are just bound to look back at with some level of nostalgia?
SC: That’s a good question. I taught fiction and the first question I always asked was, “Did you like it? How did you feel about it?” Before we start talking about it, how do you feel? They are always shocked. We are not asked in academia, how do you feel, but we are asked if something was interesting. What interests you about it? What makes you think you should write about it or talk about it? I think reading changes for those of us who go to grad school. You have to report something. There is also some of that for everyone else. Maybe you’re right, that “takeaway” mentality does sort of seep into us, especially the way things are now.
Books have to be useful, in some way. They are asked to be useful politically or personally. We like to champion books that tell us how to do things. The books that tell us how to do things are often wrong and so often, oversimplified because they think they have all the answers. We should be championing books that don’t have answers and that make us question and make us uncertain. Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.
To take it back to students, part of the reason that they feel that excitement on the first day is that they are not yet writing papers. They don’t have to make anything yet. They can just come in and say, I felt this. They don’t yet have to say what the point was. They can just respond very immediately. That moment of response is one we are not asked to take very often. We are asked to skip ahead to identifying what is valuable about this thing.
JA: I try to teach my students (and remind myself) that you don’t have to come away from a book knowing it. You can come away just knowing you experienced it and have permission not to be an expert. I was reminded of this in your memoir, when you write about how the first reading of a book can be so different than later encounters, and how being asked to know a book—and yourself—on a first read is a really big ask.
There is a lot of pressure to be able to account for whatever we encounter—whether reading or viewing or the news—to be able to give what is essentially a book report.
SC: Totally. I think there is a lot of pressure to be able to account for whatever we encounter—whether reading or viewing or the news—to be able to give what is essentially a book report. I have comprehended this event or I can account for this thing that I’ve read. But actually, education should be for the sort of not-knowing and figuring out what you do think about things, instead of being pushed into a major or a thesis or an explanation of a thing.
I’m trying very hard, as you can tell from the end of the book, to sit with uncertainty and not knowing. There will always be a thing that you can explain or think you understand, and there will always be things that are incomprehensible or too hard to look at. That process of trying to render them encounterable is a work in progress. I’m trying to be more open to that sense of ongoing revision.
JA: I love the line in your book: “The word was not the world and it never had been.” Your book made me think about the relationship between our history as readers, our lives as writers, our lives reading other people, our lives trying to figure out our own lives, revising the truths of our childhoods depending on our own healing.
SC: Until now, my life has been this series of four-year increments of college and grad school and being a junior faculty member and writing this book. I’m always waiting for a decision that’s deferred until a later date, like waiting for the reviews to come in for the book and after that’s done I’ll be waiting to see how my next project is received and what my agent thinks. The error that I have made, that I am probably still making, is thinking that all will be done someday.
In the academy, I thought when I got tenure, I would be done. Number one, that didn’t happen, but also, all the senior people I talked to were like, you’re never done. Now that I’m out, I never have to be done which means I can let go of the idea that completion would be imminent, if I was good enough. I don’t even know what it would mean to be done now. My career is different. I no longer have this very concrete goal. That might be a good thing.
JA: You write about a mental health crisis and hospital stay that prompted a break in reading. What did that interruption in regard to reading or to life mean to you?
SC: When it happened, it felt like the end of everything. I could not conceive of what was next. But now, years after, and having written this book and having left the professional stuff, I do feel like it was necessary. I think it’s too positive to say it was an awakening, but it was a jarring moment, an abandonment, as though I had been abandoned by all the things that had carried me along until that point, whether they were the pressure from my family or from my university or from myself.
I had suspicions that I was headed for a crisis, but I just thought if I could make it through…You know, a lot of people collapse after tenure or after all these things have happened. I was kind of always betting against that and hoping I would wait until after to have my collapse. But it came when it had to; it wasn’t up to me. In a weird way, I’m glad it happened then, before rather than after. If I continued writing the academic book and I continued with this career I was unhappy with and life I was unhappy with, I might have produced more or produced the thing I was supposed to produce, or I might not have.
I have to stop thinking about things in regard to success and failure, but I might have failed to do the thing undramatically, without ever having had this chance to reevaluate. I might have just not done it and been like well, why didn’t I do it? I might have failed without having a chance to learn from it. I am grateful to the collapse now for having shocked me into looking at myself and all the things I was hoping to sweep under the rug for long enough. It’s hard to say it was good or bad, but it was a necessary thing.
JA: Who do you see yourself as a reader right now?
I’m trying to reclaim some of the feeling we see in students, a sense of surprise.
SC: I’m trying to not be an expert anymore. I was just thinking last night about why it’s been an ongoing struggle for me to read. I read in fits and starts. I think it’s because I’m always trying to remind myself that I am only accountable to myself right now, when reading, except for when I’m accountable to someone for work. Because my work is being a book critic now, there still is some of that, that you owe things about a certain topic by a certain deadline. But, it’s a different kind of owing.
The only thing I owe right now is my opinion. It’s very different from being accountable as a scholar writing something peer-reviewed, where you sit down and ask, “Have I read every scholarly source about this? Have I read everything this author has written and have I read everything that everyone else has written about this author?” I will have a momentary impulse where I think that I can’t read something until I read everything that has ever been said about it.
I’m trying to reclaim some of the feeling we see in students, a sense of surprise. It’s work to undo the things that we have spent so long learning. It’s very privileged to say that I’m trying to enjoy reading—it is a privilege. I remember people outside the academy saying, “You’re so lucky, you must love just reading all day, teaching your favorite books,” and I was like no, I’m always working, always trying to make something. I felt very reluctant to admit how much fun it should be to teach and do all that we are allowed to do in the profession. It should be really fun. Those people should be right. I’m trying to embrace that it is a different kind of privilege to just have my own thoughts. I’m working on reading for only one person, for myself, rather than for everyone.
