City Lights celebrates the publication of "Bibliophobia: A Memoir" by Sarah Chihaya - published by Random House
About this Event

Sarah Chihaya in conversation with Andrea Long Chu

City Lights celebrates the publication of

Bibliophobia: A Memoir

By Sarah Chihaya

Published by Random House

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.

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn.

Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic at New York magazine. She received the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her work at New York in 2023. She has also written for outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bookforum, and n+1, and her work been has reprinted in The Best American Series. Her book Females was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2019, and a second edition with a new afterword will be published in March. Her essay collection Authority is out this April from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Praise for the work of Sarah Chihaya

“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, NYT-bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep

“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

This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation