Sarah Chihaya reads “for something: first, for comfort, for pleasure, for validation, for comprehension; later, for symptoms, for ideas, for citation, for tenure. And always, secretly, for salvation.” As she explains in her memoir, Bibliophobia, Chihaya tests each text with whether or not it can save her. She teeters between her lived world and those of the novels she reads, where she encounters the threshold of a “specific danger” against which the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin warns.¹ Unlike the epic, for instance, the novel offers readers a substitute of self-experience, or a “surrogate of a fascinating and brilliant life.” As readers, “we can experience these adventures, identify with these heroes.” But the reader, therefore, is endangered by the possibility of encountering “the novelistic zone of contact” where one must resist the temptation to “actually enter the novel.”² If we do this, Bakhtin cautions that one “might substitute for our own life an obsessive reading of novels.”³ We may refuse to untangle our own lives, he fears, from those that we read about.

Chihaya takes this obsession to its extreme, evidencing how maintaining readerly objectivity is tricky and deceptive. Resisting an invitation for entry is not feasible as she seeks for self and book to fuse. When she reads Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” she grazes the contours of “reading as it might be wholly integrated into lived experience,” while Ali Smith’s Artful makes her cognizant of how a “confusion of the text with the reader is an unhealthy mingling of life and death.”⁴

Since Chihaya has ascribed narrative with a purpose, most books inflame her literary malady of bibliophobia. More than an acute fear of books, her condition is laden with symptoms that warrant its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: The text Chihaya consults when her doctors diagnose her with a mental illness that leads to her delayed breakdown. Her bibliophobia plagues her with an array of symptoms: a contradictory titillation and nervousness in bookstores; a “fear masked as arrogant resistance” toward books she is afraid to read (like Ulysses); and a panic surrounding “a specific, unknown and unwritten book: my own.”⁵ This book refers to Chihaya’s academic monograph on “denarrative desire” that she cannot bring herself to complete, though it would have ensured the security of a tenure-track position.

Her breakdown, meticulously planned in advance, must have a “formal perfection.” If given a page in the DSM, Chihaya’s bibliophobia would be depicted as a disease infused with equal parts bibliophilia and bibliophobia, or “a necessary vacillation between love and terror.”

“What does it mean, to fall in love with a book?” asks Chihaya, as she details her love story gone awry with A. S. Byatt’s Possession. The answer to this question depends on which century’s literary practices are queried, and if the reader expects the text to serve a purpose, such as to fulfill a desire for distraction or escape.

18th-century readers consumed novels for the primary means of pleasure, writes Catherine Gallagher, in her oft-cited essay “The Rise of Fictionality.” The novel, then deemed a “voluntary luxury,” lured its readers with an invitation of indulgent immersion that was waged by “imaginative play.”⁶ Commentators and satirists of the time charged it with “seducing its readers into imaginary experiences that were remarkably hard to exit.” Yet how well could a reader play this sport? And once one rejects or accepts this invitation, what does winning precisely look like?⁷

Upon accepting the summons requested by The Bluest Eye, Anne of Green Gables, The Joan Baez Songbook, and other books, Bibliophobia tracks how Chihaya plays each inning of the novel’s game. If 18th-century readers participated by unhesitatingly burrowing themselves into the fictional world of a book, Chihaya is seduced by the potential promises of self-understanding that may await her.

Consider Chihaya’s unfinished dissertation on “denarration.” Building on Brian Richardson’s discourse on “denarration” and Peter Brooks’s theory of “narrative desire,” “denarrative desire” scrutinizes how readers express desire after finishing a book: left in an insatiable stupor whetted by literary appetite, readers want to turn back its pages upon completion, but they are circuitously led back to the text’s beginning. The reader, a stubborn lover, wants to continue the love affair rather than break up with a book by putting it back on the shelf. Chihaya argues that only then, by rebeginning the journey of reading, can one reinscribe new meanings and add “new pages to render other narrative possibilities visible.”

Thus, Chihaya herself performs denarrative desire: She constructs her memoir by critically rereading the books that have both shaped her and contributed to her eponymous illness. The “new pages” of her self-narrative are weaved with words from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being among other texts. Rather than the story of her life running alongside those that she encounters in literature, they are entwined.

Chihaya’s proclivity to frame life’s events and the people that participate in them like a book exposes her coping mechanism of applying literary frameworks to lived experience. She has organized her life into two structured plotlines—both follow her search for “two imaginary texts … that offer the comforting illusion of form in a formless life.” The “suicide plot,” on one hand, is the conception of her life as a fixed text with a morbidly unalterable ending. Accompanied with its own table of contents and an unstable plotline that only shifts into place when its denouement can be speedily reached, the suicide plot is seemingly governed by the systems of narrative theory. “The conclusion” of that story, she maintains, will be the “masterpiece” that is her self-destruction. The “reading-for-salvation” plot, on the other hand, follows her search for the perfect book: a “sacred text” that can “explain everything” to her. Perhaps if she finds this all-revealing book, it could reroute the fate of the “suicide plot” since “these two stories needed each other.” In other words, literature allows Chihaya to cling onto the hope that literature will not only give a proper form to her own narrative but also a systematic approach to bypass her fated finale. Together, these two plots thrust the memoir’s quest into focus: What happens when literature cannot bear the weight of our existential and identity-ridden impositions?

With their differential relations to and impacts on her, each book she reads takes on a character-like quality. Her literary attachment styles, which refuse to err on the side of ignorant identification, accentuate the flaws and forms of literary love. “The Glass Essay” permits her to experiment with a slippery sense of identification with Carson’s speaker whose heartbreak echoes her own; A. S. Byatt’s Possession reifies her life’s purpose and the “identity I had been looking for”; and Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life explicates how she can “interact with literary characters.” These mystical readings provoke her to instill even more faith in her dual plots, along with a growing suspicion of how deeply she can steep herself in literary realms.

The cost of searching for herself in literary texts, paradoxically, dissolves Chihaya’s selfhood; this, in turn, is another symptom of her bibliophobia. Much like a “spectral presence” that haunts the liminal space between her world and a book’s, she reads so as “to be on the cusp”: half in one world and half in the other, her ambiguous state of existence allows her not to participate fully in either.

Only semi-involved in the activity of novel reading, she concludes that disinterestedness is a feasible antidote to stave off a future bout of bibliophobia. A remedy is critical, given that her depression has shaped the “lifelong habits that made me who I am,” and these behaviors influence how she reads. Specifically, she yearns for a kind of “sublime self-destruction” that can be attained by “burying yourself in a book, haunting it and being haunted by it.” Being disinterested allows for her not only to eschew her need for books to reroute her suicide plot, but also for her to ignore the novel as it tugs at her to jump wholly inside.

Disinterest is only achieved, however, once she realized “it was painfully clear that books and stories are not enough.” And this, necessarily, robbed literature of any possibility to save her life.

Since Chihaya has ascribed narrative with a purpose, most books inflame her literary malady of bibliophobia.

Reading is an intimate act embedded in desire: the desire to pick up a book, the desire to complete it, the desire to understand it fully, and the desire to reread it better or anew (vis-à-vis denarrative desire). Even more, the two plots of Chihaya’s self-narrative manifest two forms of desire that Peter Brooks sets out to explore in his study Reading for the Plot: “the conjunction of the narrative of desire and the desire of narrative.”⁸ Brooks hereby gives narrative an ontological capacity that aligns with the reader’s: Narrative has an inherent desire to move forward, and readers simultaneously desire to follow the plot until it ends. Bibliophobia destabilizes Brooks’s theory of narrative desire, because, theoretically, two working plots should effectively carry readers to the end of the story. By establishing early in the text that her two plots are unfulfilled, failed plots carry the memoir forward. Because her self-narrative “failed to end how I thought it would,” plot’s “motor force” (a phrase borrowed from Brooks) malfunctions in her lived experience and in Bibliophobia.⁹ Yet these failed plots of her lived experience are themselves supplanted by Chihaya into the narrative structure of Bibliophobia.

Moreover, this plot of failed plots cultivates the reader’s own desire: to learn how and why they are formally unsatisfied. Chihaya’s rejoinder would be to welcome the self-revision of the plots that structure our lives, and to think “about what it means to have the stories that you tell yourself, about yourself, suddenly revised.” She precisely performs denarrative desire by reworking her internalized and written narratives. This redrafting takes the form of her plucking away at former manifestations of madness bred by an obsession with literary methods: believing that suicide is a “kind of firm narrative closure,” reading herself and friends “as readers in an enclosed, safe network of narrative theoretical concepts,” and focusing on “the idea of life as narrative structure, and narrative structure as control.” Her skepticism of narrative closure is thereby reflected in her admittance of plot failure and soft complaints—like “I’m losing track of what I’m supposed to be doing here”—that denote uncertainty about how the book should move linearly.

What happens when plot refuses to work how we expect it to? How does our idea of plot’s structures change when it can no longer operate or resolve itself effectively?

If we agree with Brooks, that narrative holds an inherent desire to flow forth rhythmically and logically, then we must believe that this desire also possesses the ability to turn back on itself. A storyline’s undulations are choppy, which is evinced by temporal thrashings between analepsis, the present, and prolepsis. Susceptible to cogs in the narrative wheel, plot can stumble and stop abruptly on its own whim. The certainty of narrative closure becomes equally dubious thus Chihaya suspends any belief in sharp narrative closure. By pursuing her failed plots, she dispels the scholarly assumption that narrative, along with the reader’s desire for it, is what carries one to the end of a story.

In Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the Reader says, “I mean, let’s hope we get to the end satisfactorily.” Like Calvino’s novel, Chihaya’s memoir mistrusts narrative and questions its shortcomings.¹⁰ The quintessential metafictional tale of obsessive reading, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler follows “the Reader” on his search for a totalistic tale that he cannot literally wrap his hands around. (The books the Reader searches for remain elusive: unfound, untranslated, and even unrecognizable.) His journey is typified by the verdict that narrative must lead to closure, finality, certainty. But this can never be reached because, as Merve Emre suggests, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler simply “refuses to begin.”¹¹

For its part, Bibliophobia refuses to end. Both plots remain unterminated; “neither of the plots I’d been following diligently in my life to this point had come to their proper conclusions: I had not killed myself, and it had not been a book that saved me.” Put more succinctly, “the end was not the end.”

In Calvino’s penultimate chapter, the Reader finds himself in a library with other readers who participate in a chorus of novelistic convictions. The seventh reader’s voice chimes in, “it is the end that counts … the true end, final, concealed in the darkness, the goal to which the book wants to carry you. I also seek openings in reading … but my gaze digs between the words to try to discern what is outlined in the distance, in the spaces that extend beyond the words ‘the end.’”¹² This reader—much like Chihaya as she struggles with bibliophobia—does not believe in the fallacy of closure that a book’s last page disguises with its final hush: finis.¹³ Books, for both Chihaya and Calvino’s seventh reader, not only can’t end but involve some form of making the text pliable to their desires.

Plot is malleable, too, and the metanarrative illustrates this more clearly than other literary genres. In Machado de Assis’s 19th-century novel-masked-as-memoir The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the already-dead narrator attempts to establish a connection between the reader and the text while thinking aloud of the plot’s structure. Brás Cubas discloses early in his memoir, “I debated for a time as to whether I ought to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end—that is, if I would start out with my birth or with my death.”¹⁴ Cubas raises questions about the sequential nature of plot—does his story change depending on where he starts? Chihaya, likewise, repurposes narrative’s self-aware capabilities not to falsely beckon her readers closer to the end—under the guise that they can participate in her plot’s trajectory—but to demonstrate that if narrative’s endings are compelling, so too are its failures and its unstable scaffoldings.¹⁵

The decision we must make as readers of these books becomes whether we buy into a feeling of genuine or feigned familiarity that the narrative establishes, when it wonders with us how to move along.

Enthused by how Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne “lay bare” their technique, the Russian Formalists frequently turned to Don Quixote and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as exemplum for their theories. But what are the implications of this “laying bare” or a narrative that is self-aware of its status as a written medium?

Metanarrative, writ large, is literariness made obvious: an attention to and an exaggeration of the author’s maneuvering of narrative assembly. It is not a stretch to posit that Chihaya is working in a shadow tradition of the metanarrative, since her writing has “mostly been about form” and she is interested in “the form-making impulse in the work of different authors, and the attraction narrative forms hold for us in our lives, both in and out of books.” As she knows, the transference of literary theory to lived practice calls for new application methods.

A self-conscious narrative however allows for an unsteady slippage between the two, if the reader plays the game of questioning the metanarrative as it does itself. With this genre in mind, a contemporary addendum to Gallagher’s piece is that a way to engage in a story’s “imaginative play” is to decide whether to play the novel’s game or not. The actual game, then, becomes how close one should be with the narrative: a casual companion, a distant admirer, or an unsuspecting friend. Together, will the pair of reader-book ever trip on exactly the same lines in their efforts to question textual motive and reason together? Maybe the journey instead will be a lonely one, marked by a frustration or misunderstanding of the other.

As Bibliophobia inches closer to its last page, Chihaya confesses, “I cannot in good conscience tell you that I have totally let go of either the suicide plot or the reading-for-salvation plot—for what is this book if not a version of that?” Unable to shake the belief that narrative and its theoretical structures holds certain truths, Chihaya is convinced of literature’s capability to refract selfhood and simultaneously, furiously, interrogate that belief. In this, her memoir’s form provides a compelling guise of compactness and mystique. It forces narrative decisions to be made; and a self-conscious text is an attempt to rebel against such confines, by way of possible alterative paths in narration.

We are right to be skeptical of the self-questioning story, though, even if it is unclear whether the reader or the text can follow the plot more knowledgably. The decision we must make as readers of these books becomes whether we buy into a feeling of genuine or feigned familiarity that the narrative establishes, when it wonders with us how to move along.

But, again, not only can the text turn back on itself, but it can turn against us readers. Should we be prepared to be implored by or even accused by it? Calvino’s narrator, for one, censures the Reader for not defying the allure of textual participation: “Reader, what are you doing? Aren’t you going to resist? Aren’t you going to escape? Ah, you are participating.… Ah, you fling yourself into it, too.… You’re the absolute protagonist of this book.”¹⁶