Though she attempted suicide three times between the ages of 10 and 18, Chihaya writes, \u201cOne thing I was pretty sure about [the term] \u2018nervous breakdown\u2019 was that it was not for people like me.\u201d The child of a Japanese immigrant and a Japanese Canadian woman who \u201cdidn\u2019t really believe in the concept of mental health,\u201d she diagnosed her adult self as \u201ca self-harm hobbyist, a casual insomniac, and a nonchalant bulimic,\u201d 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. \u201cI was always reading for something,\u201d she comments, \u201cfor validation, for comprehension\u2026and always, secretly, for salvation.\u201d 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\u2019s terrifying The Bluest Eye, which voiced her teenage fears of failing to measure up to \u201call the provinces of whiteness,\u201d to Ruth Ozeki\u2019s reassuring A Tale for the Time Being, read while she was an anxious assistant professor, which \u201ckicked up my faith in a book that could save me.\u201d At times, Chihaya\u2019s analysis of the effect certain books had on her is so minute it becomes wearying, and her many definitions of bibliophobia\u2014\u201cacute, literal fear of books,\u201d \u201cviolent fits of melancholy and resentment after finishing a book,\u201d \u201csuperstitious fear of incompletion,\u201d and more\u2014make her explanation that \u201cbibliophobia is many things\u201d 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\u2019s probing and wrenchingly honest. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though she attempted suicide three times between the ages of 10 and 18, Chihaya writes, \u201cOne thing I was pretty sure about [the term] \u2018nervous breakdown\u2019 was that it was not for people like me.\u201d The child of a Japanese immigrant and a Japanese Canadian woman who \u201cdidn\u2019t really believe in the concept of mental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}