Some 3/4 of the way through this book, Chihaya talks about reading other memoirs about depression, and says “Even now I find the genre difficult to face. After encountering Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation in college and feeling affronted both by how like and how utterly unlike it was to my experience of adolescence, I wholly avoided books of this type.” I don’t want to wholly avoid depression memoirs, books about academia, or meditations on reading, but I get what she means. There is something particularly fraught about the combination of close close resemblance and bewildering difference that makes books like this really tough to read (all the more so if it’s coupled with a tinge of insecurity or competitiveness, like if you have also written a book about your reading life). And a weird anxiety about becoming the person you’re reading; losing yourself.
I thought that what I would most relate to in this memoir would be the stuff about books, but to my surprise, I didn’t connect to that part so much. Chihaya and I are very different readers, I guess (which is cool!). What we do share, alas, is imposter syndrome, most perniciously, perhaps, when it comes to our own feelings. There was a line in this book that absolutely rocked me: “I was not special, nor did I have to be special to be officially fucked up.” I don’t feel especially inclined to elaborate, but, yeah. I haven’t read depression memoirs in a long time (I devoured them as a depressed teenager), but there is something comforting, albeit also deeply unpleasant, in that jolt of recognition you get when your own experience is so precisely described.
Kasia Reads 