Love Books? You Still Might Suffer From Bibliophobia

Bibliophobia: occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books, though more frequently develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound—perhaps too profound—attachments to books and literature. (There is some clinical overlap here with bibliolepsy, as pathologized by Gina Apostol in her study of the latter: “Bibliolepsy: a mawkishness derived from habitual aloneness and congenital desire….Biblioleptic.”)

It can have many symptoms and can appear as a diverse range of seemingly unrelated difficulties pertaining to books and reading. Bibliophobia can only occur when someone has, crudely stated, loved books to a dangerous degree.

You may have bibliophobia if you frequently experience intense reactions to books that somehow act on you, or activate you, in ways that you suspect are unhealthy or hurtful—or at times, simply bad for you. And yet they are necessary; you would not be you without them.

Childhood symptoms of my bibliophobia included: violent fits of melancholy and resentment after finishing a book I didn’t want to end. Superstitious fear of incompletion, lest the book know that I put it down halfway and be angry. Repetitive readings that verged on morbid obsession, or perhaps Caligari-like hypnosis. A devout belief in the totemic power of the individual book itself and a fixation on particular copies that could not be lost or replaced.

This last actually continued embarrassingly into adulthood and translated into a peculiar horror of specific books that, for one reason or another, terrified me such that I had to hide or immediately dispose of them so they wouldn’t somehow infest my living space—examples include Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker or Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (which I had to shamefacedly go and buy right back from the used bookstore in grad school when I decided I actually wanted to write about it).

Advanced symptoms of the adult bibliophobe: alternating rhapsodic delight and gripping anxiety in particularly good bookstores; fear masked as arrogant resistance to certain books I was meant to have read but was secretly sure I could never understand (I’m looking at you, Ulysses); creeping suspicion that I am not a person but a card catalog of the books that I’ve read. The notion that certain books—you never know which ones!—can somehow overpower or enthrall their readers, such that we might never escape them.

But while the idea of living in a book appealed to me as a child, as an adult it seems more and more like plain old madness.

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Bibliophobia is many things. It is about the fear of the idea of books themselves, of particular books I have known, and of a specific, unknown and unwritten book: my own.

At some point in my dramatic adolescence, I decided that I was allowed to die after I wrote one good book. Sometimes, paradoxically, I thought this one book could be everything: both the book that saved me (because surely it would make me eternally famous) and the one that killed me.

This conviction, irrational though it is, has never left me. One book—I didn’t even have to see it in print, the posthumously published work appeals to me—and I would be finished, free.

When my bibliophobia really started to build, leading up to the long-anticipated breakdown, I had been working fruitlessly on many different versions of the book I was required to write for my job as a tenure-track professor of literature: my first academic monograph.

“Nothing good is mono,” mused my friend Sophie, also a writer and disgruntled scholar. “Monograph, monotony, monogamy….”

Of all the genres that populated my dangerously overstocked shelves, this is the one that terrified me the most: the standard, hoop-jumping, tenure-getting first book composed of a smart introduction, four pertly observant chapters, a pithy or provocative conclusion, a long bibliography. It seems so simple laid out like that.

Part of my terror came from this perceived simplicity. But another part of it came from the long-held certainty that I only had one book in me. Was it really this one?

“Just write your book,” my senior colleagues would tell me as we breezed by each other in the hallway. “Just write your book,” my father sternly told me on our increasingly rare calls. “Just write your book,” said my non-academic friends, puzzled as to why I’d been working on some mysterious air-quotes “book project” for so many years with nothing to show for it.

But more and more, every time I sat down to reread what I’d done, or even to hash out the most basic copyedits from finished sections, I slumped over, my body falling in upon itself. In the months leading up to my hospitalization, actual physical disintegration set in like a punishing plague, an event I now find hilariously literal-minded: Coming back from my first day of the fall semester in 2018, I developed a wide swath of oozing boils across my shoulders that were biblically revolting and mystifying even to a dermatologist.

Apparently, an intervention was called for. Sitting at my kitchen table one day that fall, my friend Merve told me that I just had to write a book, any book, and that I should just start by writing letters to her. With our friends Katherine and Juno, we had just finished a collectively authored epistolary manuscript, the only sustained project I’d been able to work on successfully for years. Maybe it would work this time, too?

Generous as this offer was, she had a steely, zealous immigrant-parent glint in her eyes, and I had at once the distinct, future-oriented, absurd feeling that I was experiencing what her teenage children might someday feel when she gives them a serious talking-to, and a jarring, pained flashback to my own childhood, being disciplined at the kitchen table by my father.

There’s something about that primal scene: sitting in my family’s suburban dinette under a pendant lamp that comically hints at the single bulb of a noir detective interrogation, between the hapless cop that is my mom and the unhinged cop that is my dad, sweating under the pressure. I’m not sure if Merve did it on purpose, but this setup is a trick that works on me every time.

On that day, we were supposed to go pick up something to eat, but I had started crying—there was never a reason why in those days—and I could not stop. My sudden crisis was keeping us from lunch, another throwback to those family kitchen confrontations, which seemed to always be keeping dinner on hold.

I told her tearfully that I was an ungrateful idiot who didn’t deserve the life I’d been given. That everything was over because I just couldn’t write the goddamned straightforward book required of me, and that I could name fifty other smarter, better people who should have the tenure line that I occupied so cravenly. That I had stupidly and selfishly wasted all my too-abundant, unearned chances, and because of this, I had to be punished.

I couldn’t do this one stupid thing, the only thing that everyone seemed to think determined my worth, and it just proved what I had always known to be true, that I had nothing worth giving. I didn’t say it, but the words escaped and hung between us silently anyway: If I couldn’t write the book, I might as well kill myself.

She blanched and looked terrified for a split second, but by then she’d heard me say things like this over and over again. She’d responded with gentleness, or fear, or patience, or a firmly held hand, or a joke. I looked into her stern but pleading eyes and could not tell her the truth. I promised I would continue writing, and so continue living. But I knew that I could not do the former, and I didn’t want to do the latter.

Sitting in my campus office that semester, my desk facing the long wall where all my critical books were shelved, I felt an occasional panic that grew more and more frequent. I would try to look at a book I’d read before, one I thought I understood and perhaps knew well and even loved—say, Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings—and, peering inside, just not be able to make the words line up.

Am I going crazy? I wondered, or am I just tired and scared that my career, which is to say my life, is over before it has even begun? I became sickeningly afraid that I had lost myself, not in books that drew me in, but among books that shut me out.

Looking at these books, I felt shunned, like I’d walked into a chamber full of hostile turned backs. I felt more and more certain that I had been pretending this whole time to understand a world that I fundamentally did not, and I had exhausted my resources trying to keep up the illusion.

It’s understandable that nobody noticed that I was gradually losing my mind, because these are perfectly normal conditions for the untenured scholar. I was the luckiest of these—I had a job. The job is what kept me going, in both good and bad ways.

It was, after all, another reason it was not time for my breakdown; there were students and colleagues relying on me. And, more pressingly, I had nothing to complain about, having miraculously made it out of the vicious academic job market employed and visibly unscathed.

I tried not to worry about my worsening book fear. Everyone felt this way or worse, I told myself, and everyone else is dealing with it like adults. I did my best to hide the fact that I could barely bring myself to read more than a paragraph at a time, much less write anything, to varying degrees of success. I made it to the end of the semester, limping through the long, darkening fall months.

But then winter came, and with it, the long-awaited collapse.

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Excerpted from Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Chihaya. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.