Bibliophobia

by Sarah Chihaya

Nothing interested me—and this, in the end, is what saved me. I had no interest in anything, no curiosity. All I felt was: I am depressed, I am depressed. And then, this depression generated its own flicker of recovery. I became interested in depression…. I became interested in things again. I began to follow things up. Depression is the hidden non-plot of the whole book, but Dyer can only admit it at the end. It explains everything and does not explain anything at the same time. When I recalled this moment, I still couldn’t read, and so couldn’t leaf through Out of Sheer Rage to look up its exact wording. But it made me wonder.

When I was sliding into or crawling out of one of the dark, immobile states that fill many of my few childhood memories, the only thing I could do was stay in bed and read. It was a way to be awake but not present; it was also a way to be “doing something” in the eyes of my parents, while actually doing nothing.

I had not yet learned that there are ways to read such that books stay with you—in you—forever. I was years away from the understanding that there are certain books that modify your chemical composition so palpably you fear you might no longer breathe air or drink water. And it becomes clear that something ever so slight but important in the way you read the world is altered forever. These are the books that make us grow up or sometimes realize that we have long since grown up.

As a person, I cannot solidify into someone who makes anything happen.

To be in a house and hear the sound of a garage door opening makes me hold my breath even now, no matter who might be pulling in.

My dad was scary and always unpredictable, but so are lots of parents. And lots of them are so much worse; we lived in a nauseating atmosphere of possible violence or near violence or mild violence, but as far as I know, it hardly ever erupted into real physical danger, for me at least.

I’m afraid that we are very alike. I will never have children.

My central flaw is a sadness that seems to come from nowhere and cannot be stopped from spreading and corrupting everything it touches; the faults spread out beyond me and reached deep into the foundations of every house I’ve lived in. It’s a sadness that so often feels like it is mine and only mine.

It’s strange to think that I was always reading, but I can’t say what I was reading.

It wasn’t the books themselves that did anything; it was the feeling of immersion. I wanted to stay inside that feeling, but I already knew it was frustratingly temporary—no matter how hard I tried to stay with them, books would always have their own worlds, from which I was ultimately barred. This was a confusing and hurtful knowledge.

I do remember this kind of childhood reading seeming safe and certain, but that safety was limited—sitting alone in my room, library books scattered in a ring around me like warding runes, I knew they could not keep me in blissful isolation for real, or forever. I think it’s the determined firmness with which I sealed myself inside the shelter of fiction that makes so many of the books I read at that time blur together. It almost didn’t matter what world I was retreating to inside any given book, as long as I could leave my body where it was, sitting in my bedroom with the door closed, shutting out the shouting or—sometimes worse—the cold, watchful silence radiating up the stairs, waiting to be broken. All those books thatched together to keep me insulated from everything outside the door. But I knew even then that the shelter they offered was small and fragile. A necessary illusion of safety.

Was it as painful as I remember, as painful as I’m telling you it was? I had drawn a careful star in the margin. Had I guessed that someday I, like Claudia, would find myself questioning the truth of memory? Or did I intuit that whatever pain there was would ultimately prove “productive and fructifying,” and its fruit would feed everything I’d do or write?

“Please, God,” she whispered into the palm of her hand. “Please make me disappear.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush. Slowly again. Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too, went away. Then her chest, her neck. The face was hard, too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left.

I’d had great hopes for instant transformation, imagining that I would finally become the devastatingly compelling, wild, brilliant, attractive, all-around strange and extraordinary person I hadn’t been allowed to be at home.

The familial love I knew was a painful, unbalanced burden rather than a source of pleasure or comfort. Real love, I thought, would instantaneously transport me to the real life I was destined for.

Nobody had asked me to really dwell in thought yet—a third category—myself included. The closest thing I knew to this activity was the kind of obsessive, intrusive worry and fear that plagued me when I couldn’t sleep or sat alone for too long without a book or a friend and that terrified me; it was certainly not an activity I sought out, though it sought me out all too often.

Instead, we developed that kind of friendship that builds up out of the tiny grains of shared time that are the by-product of school or a certain kind of workplace—the kind of situation where you are often together, underoccupied, and mercifully unhurried.

It never occurred to me that Becca was quietly reading me this whole time, in a workmanlike and scholarly way. This figure of a caring, diligent, loving but unromantic reader didn’t fit into my vision of both literature and life, which was filled with showy virtuosity and arrogant command. Our friendship was, from the beginning, structured by two things: my imperious pronouncements that things had to be a certain way and her generous habit of nodding along and humoring me as far as was responsible. I didn’t see that for all those years she was unassumingly working away at a competing reading of who we each were, taking detailed mental notes for her own interpretation of the collaboratively authored text of our friendship, and that perhaps hers was the better and truer one.

Even after my breakdown, when I had let go of everything else I was sure about, I held on to my belief in how our friendship worked, assuming I knew everything we could offer each other. This supposed knowledge was ultimately the thing that drove a wedge between us—invisibly at first, then with an awkward and increasingly painful obviousness. After being together through the pandemic—she was one of the few people in my pod—I felt wearily afraid that we knew each other so well that it was the end of knowing.

The too-much is part of life, I tell myself now. The too-much is life, and so is the nothing. (I have to keep telling myself this.)

So much of the reading I do is kneeling at the graveside, waiting for something to reemerge and take me down with it—to ghost me, not in the casual abandonment sense of the term, but by taking me away from life and sweeping me into the dark void of whatever lies beyond the page.

The great cruelty of writing is this realization that the experience for which I long the most as a reader—an encounter with someone who makes me believe that they have articulated exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, in the most perfect and irreplaceable terms—is a kind of death. The sublimity of total recognition is the sublimity of inescapable failure; reading the text you have been searching for means that you can never write it. Discovering something like this is to experience at once a thrilling and a hopeless self-obliteration.

Almost everyone else on the ward had a yellow bracelet signifying that they’d been undergoing shock therapy; everyone else had meaningful and significant problems that could be classified as genuine illness. I was just an imposter who’d overindulged in self-pity and accidentally landed myself in the ER. After all, most of my friends since college had, at some point, considered themselves at least a little depressed, at least a little OCD, and, in the case of the majority of my female friends, at least dabblers in disordered eating. Here I was again, I thought, copying. Assimilating. And worse, assimilating badly. If I alone of all the people I knew had ended up in psychiatric care, it must have been through some weakness or additional flaw of my own.

Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind.

Perhaps I have only ever been my own ghost,

In a horribly irresponsible way, it let me off the hook. I was consumed with the idea—which I now recognize as willfully stupid and cruelly selfish—that this clear ending would force everyone to see that there was no other way for the story to end, and therefore that none of the other characters in it—themselves included—could have stopped the forward motion of the plot or revised the final page.

The sooner I forced this ending, I thought, the sooner everyone could just get over it. There were other, better books out there for them to read.

The dissatisfaction of reading is incurable, but one might try and assuage it by rereading—finding, once we’ve fulfilled our drive to get to the end of a story, that it provokes a perverse, equal and opposite desire to go back to the beginning.

But writing over is not the same as erasing; generating more narrative never actually undoes that first reading. Despite the urgent want to re-view—to see something else from a different angle—you can’t unsee something, just as you can’t unwrite what is written, or make someone unread what they have already read.