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Bibliophobia: A Memoir Audiobook

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Release Date: February 4, 2025
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Read By: Traci Kato-Kiriyama Publisher: Random House Audio Listen Time: at 1.0x Speed 4.50 hours at 1.5x Speed 3.38 hours at 2.0x Speed
Release Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Unabridged Audiobook ISBN: 9798217020737

Quick Stats About this Audiobook

Total Audiobook Chapters:

14

Longest Chapter Length:

64:24 minutes

Shortest Chapter Length:

05 seconds

Average Chapter Length:

29:27 minutes

Audiobooks by this Author:

1

Publisher Description

“A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True



“A must for the obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”.

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.

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"A moving account of the experience of loving, fearing, and resenting literature, written with the authority of a trained specialist and the solicitude of an amateur. Sarah Chihaya is funny, subtle, and—particularly when writing about her own life—as sharp as cut glass. Whether reflecting on a Toni Morrison novel or flipping through the oldest book in the world, Chihaya refuses to bracket herself out. She is always there alongside us, patient and generous but never doing us the disservice of protecting us from the text. It is there, and she is there too: that is enough. If you hate books the way I do, this one you’ll love."

— Andrea Long Chu, New York Magazine critic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Quotes

  • Bibliophobia feels like the first book I have ever read that accords the correct (massive) weight to the role of books in my own life, reminding me how high the stakes were when I first fell in love with reading, and restoring to me the sense that books are still a matter of life and death. At once a radical analysis of the relationship between reading, writing, and suicide, and a case study in how seemingly unnarratable and overwhelming experience can be transformed into a transcendent book. A must for any obsessive reader.

    — Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, Either/Or, and Possessed
  • A moving account of the experience of loving, fearing, and resenting literature, written with the authority of a trained specialist and the solicitude of an amateur. Sarah Chihaya is funny, subtle, and—particularly when writing about her own life—as sharp as cut glass. Whether reflecting on a Toni Morrison novel or flipping through the oldest book in the world, Chihaya refuses to bracket herself out. She is always there alongside us, patient and generous but never doing us the disservice of protecting us from the text. It is there, and she is there too: that is enough. If you hate books the way I do, this one you’ll love.

    — Andrea Long Chu, New York Magazine critic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
  • An instant classic in the books-about-books genre, this heady, confiding memoir offers a refreshingly nuanced take on what books do to us. They do not always make us better, more empathetic citizens of the world. Sometimes they haunt us, force us to face things we don’t want to see, and ruin our lives. Sarah Chihaya has done something remarkable: written a book about losing yourself in books that you can lose yourself in.

    — Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep and Also a Poet
  • Bibiliophobia gave me, well . . . bibliophobia. Sarah Chihaya has written a book that’s so wise, so funny, so understanding of all the layering foibles and tragedies that can form a person, that by the end, I held the book with a feeling of awe.

    — Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
  • A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.

    — Hua Hsu, author of Stay True
  • Bibliophobia is breathtaking—I gasped, I laughed, I wept, I admired as I tore through this unceasingly intelligent and unflinching examination of the stories we tell ourselves in order to die. A beautiful, rapturous, and darkly funny meditation on the mutual ruin, love, haunting, heartbreak, betrayal, fear, and dependence that we share with the books that wreck and redeem our lives.

    — Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift and The Furrows
  • Bibliophobia gave me, well . . . bibliophobia. Sarah Chihaya has written a book that’s so wise, so funny, so understanding of all the layering foibles and tragedies that can form a person, that by the end, I held the book with a feeling of awe.

    — Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
  • Reading Bibliophobia is like having a deep and intimate conversation with a kindred lover of literature: The world may not become better, but in this conversation we each become less isolated and lonely.

    — Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
  • A beautiful, rapturous, and darkly funny meditation on the mutual ruin, love, haunting, heartbreak, betrayal, fear, and dependence that we share with the books that wreck and redeem our lives.

    — Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows
  • An instant classic. This heady, confiding memoir offers a refreshingly nuanced take on what books do to us. Sarah Chihaya has done something remarkable: written a book about losing yourself in books that you can lose yourself in.

    — Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep
  • Sarah Chihaya is funny, subtle, and—particularly when writing about her own life—as sharp as cut glass.

    — Andrea Long Chu, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York magazine critic
  • Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya’s plaintive debut. Evocative and astute . . . her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful. The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature.

    — Publishers Weekly, starred review
  • Bibliophobia feels like the first book I have ever read that accords the correct (massive) weight to the role of books in my own life, reminding me how high the stakes were when I first fell in love with reading, and restoring to me the sense that books are still a matter of life and death. At once a radical analysis of the relationship between reading, writing, and suicide, and a case study in how seemingly unnarratable and overwhelming experience can be transformed into a transcendent book. A must for any obsessive reader.

    — Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, Either/Or, and Possessed
  • Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya’s plaintive debut. Evocative and astute . . . her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful. The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature.

    — Publishers Weekly, starred review
  • With beauty and precision, Chihaya weaves her experiences as a lifetime reader and deep appreciator of books into accounts of heartbreak, identity issues, mental-health crises, and family. She analyzes pivotal texts with generosity, vulnerability, and humor . . . [Bibliophobia] may encourage rereading or reading anew, and taking a closer look into how literature can sustain or derail us. It also feels like a force that may become, for some, its own brand of Life Ruiner.

    — Booklist, starred review

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