Review by Booklist Review
Chihaya, a book critic, essayist, and editor, defines a "Life Ruiner" as "the book you can't ever recover from." That is, while it's "a book that starts you on a quest," it doesn't "end in resolution or salvation." With beauty and precision, Chihaya weaves her experiences as a lifetime reader and deep appreciator of books into accounts of cross-country and global moves, heartbreak, identity issues, mental-health crises, and family. She analyzes pivotal texts with keen academic ability, as well as generosity, vulnerability, and humor. As a child, Chihaya "went to books because [she] wanted to be--nothing, nobody." She writes, "I wanted nothing so much as to be a kind of sociable air, circulating invisibly in the room, necessary but never noticed." Literature becomes her companion and a vehicle from which to remove herself from discomfort. Eventually, she does find herself in the books, a result that produces a legend with which to decipher her life's geography. Bibliophobia will strike a feeling of familiarity in some readers. It 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Passionate reading entwines with madness in essayist and NYU English instructor Chihaya's plaintive debut. The author recaps her history of mental illness, including three suicide attempts, which culminated in a 2019 nervous breakdown provoked by "bibliophobia," or the intense fear of writing and reading. Along the way, she interprets her autobiography through critical appreciations of books that shaped her and her scholarly vocation. The Anne of Green Gables series, in which Chihaya immersed herself during childhood, provided a refuge from her abusive dad and her shyness. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye awakened her to issues of social justice and racism and shed light on her feelings of marginalization as a Japanese American. A.S. Byatt's Possession, about two scholars who fall in love as they study Victorian poets who might have fallen in love, illuminated Chihaya's destructive pattern of treating her own lovers and friends as if they were characters in her life story. Chihaya's depictions of her depression are evocative and astute ("I was accustomed, then addicted, to what little pain there was," she writes of her cutting habit), and her literary analysis is thought-provoking and graceful (Possession ignites "a pleasurably futile search for complete knowledge of the other that can never be attained--and yet--we cannot stop trying"). The result is a revelatory meditation on the unsettling resonances between life and literature. Agent: Hafizah Geter, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
For book critic and essayist Chihaya (The Ferrante Letters), bookish obsessions can turn into emotional, sometimes painful, literary encounters that change readers' lives. Books, she asserts, are reflections of the pleasures, prejudices, anxieties, struggles, and desires that make people utterly, unbearably human. Her memoir shows that for her, living through and in books meant experiencing her cultural dislocation as a Japanese American in a white Cleveland suburb. For example, when Chihaya read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and saw how Morrison portrayed racial relations, she was able to relate that narrative to reach the depths of how she herself felt about being a person of color in a predominantly white neighborhood. The experience made Chihaya wonder whether she--and others--could rewrite narratives in restorative ways. This literary work, a combination of memoir and criticism, spotlights Chihaya's journey of highs and lows as she sought that answer for herself. VERDICT Vulnerable yet acerbic, this moving interrogation of the stories that helped Chihaya survive in a predominantly white environment validates the real and raw ways in which books shape people's internal and external identities in personal, political, psychological, and social ways.--Emily Bowles
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The promise--and peril--of books. Though she attempted suicide three times between the ages of 10 and 18, Chihaya writes, "One thing I was pretty sure about [the term] 'nervous breakdown' was that it was not for people like me." The child of a Japanese immigrant and a Japanese Canadian woman who "didn't really believe in the concept of mental health," she diagnosed her adult self as "a self-harm hobbyist, a casual insomniac, and a nonchalant bulimic," rather than someone seriously distressed. Dark humor like this slightly leavens the grim mood as Chihaya delineates her intense and in her judgment often harmful relationship with books. "I was always readingfor something," she comments, "for validation, for comprehension…and always, secretly, for salvation." Only after her inability to write the academic monograph required for academic tenure prompted a full-fledged collapse was she forced to acknowledge her precarious emotional state. Her probing and wrenchingly honest memoir looks back on books that affected her powerfully in various ways, from Toni Morrison's terrifyingThe Bluest Eye, which voiced her teenage fears of failing to measure up to "all the provinces of whiteness," to Ruth Ozeki's reassuringA Tale for the Time Being, read while she was an anxious assistant professor, which "kicked up my faith in a book that could save me." At times, Chihaya's analysis of the effect certain books had on her is so minute it becomes wearying, and her many definitions ofbibliophobia--"acute, literal fear of books," "violent fits of melancholy and resentment after finishing a book," "superstitious fear of incompletion," and more--make her explanation that "bibliophobia is many things" seem like nervous justification. Nonetheless, she offers an intriguing alternate view of passionate reading, and the closing pages movingly describe Chihaya coming to terms with the fact that she will always be a suicide risk. The book offers more than some readers will want to know, but it's probing and wrenchingly honest. An elegantly written memoir of a lifelong struggle with mental illness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
