How book therapy can help you with emotional problems and life changes, and the two bibliotherapists currently self-medicating
- Book therapy, or bibliotherapy, brought Germaine Leece and Sonya Tsakalakis together and now they use their love of reading to help others
- With this form of therapy you read for emotional expression and release, not for intellectual understanding or to dissect a text
After more than 200 days of lockdown, bibliotherapist Sonya Tsakalakis is weary of being cooped up and has been seeking out novels about faraway places in faraway times.
“I just want to be a long way from home,” she says, from Melbourne, Australia. “At the moment I’m reading The Painted Kiss [2005, by Elizabeth Hickey]; it’s a reimagining of [artist Gustav] Klimt and his muse. It’s so delightful to be in sumptuous Vienna and it is so beautifully written; it really creates a sense of place and time, and the love of art and how driven people are by their passions.”
Germaine Leece, Tsakalakis’ Sydney-based bibliotherapist pen pal and her co-author on Reading the Seasons: Books Holding Life and Friendship Together (published by Thames & Hudson Australia) has sought quite different pandemic reading, opting for thrillers such as Alex Michaelides’ new novel, The Maidens.
“There is something about releasing adrenaline that can’t be released in another way or that feeling that there’s something even worse that could happen,” Tsakalakis says. “I’ve also been reading the classics; I’m going into very much the inner world at the moment.”
Bibliotherapy, the use of literature to help people cope with emotional problems and changes in their lives, brought the women together, but they say no two readers are the same, even if they are living parallel lives or shared experiences.
With this form of therapy, they add, you are reading for emotional expression and release, not for intellectual understanding or to dissect a text. Reading the Seasons contains years of letters the pair sent each other every week, about books for themselves and their clients.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they conceived the book at almost the same time two years ago, figuring their letters would be a means of explaining the process of bibliotherapy.
“It’s really exciting to think you’ve got your own path and treasure trove of books to find,” says Leece, who began her career in publishing and editing only to retrain in 2012 to be a psychotherapist. When she came across an article in The New Yorker about bibliotherapy, she decided it would be a perfect marriage of her two careers and approached the School of Life in Sydney, where she trained as a bibliotherapist.
Tsakalakis was a genetic counsellor. She stumbled across bibliotherapy in a 2008 story in The Guardian headlined “The Reading Cure”, and learned that the idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back thousands of years. In 2014, after doing more reading, she approached the then newly opened School of Life in Melbourne for a position as a bibliotherapist.
Two years later the two women came across each other in a bibliotherapists’ email group. They began exchanging emails about books and this shared love of literature became the foundation of their friendship. They looked for writing that would take their clients on journeys, providing distance from problems and the space to be able to self-reflect and see an issue played out.
Tsakalakis enjoys the sense of mystery that comes with reading fiction, not knowing what it is that will spur a moment of self-awareness and insight or with which character you will connect. A mother, she was going through a divorce when she began her correspondence with Leece and discussed the books that were helping her and the challenge of single parenting.
“It wasn’t just reading books for reading’s sake,” Tsakalakis says.
A bibliotherapist’s art is listening to clients’ stories and then choosing books – often about six, from fiction to non-fiction and poetry – that will resonate with them. The prescription, which is based on more than single life events, takes into account emotions they are experiencing and how those might be mirrored in specific narratives. Or it might be that books are needed to transport readers from their situations.
Every book selected is accompanied by a rationale for that choice. For some, just having that prescription after an hour-long conversation can be therapeutic – a validation that they have been heard.
“You can’t make an assumption about what the client wants,” says Tsakalakis, adding that conversation is extremely important and that she might ask someone going through a break-up or grieving the loss of a beloved, “What are you looking for? Do you want to escape? Do you want something light? Or do you want to plunge into the depths of what you are feeling?”
“We all are bibliotherapists in the sense that we search out books that we need,” adds Leece, who, like her co-author, works with fiction only. She describes that feeling of receiving a book and thinking, “I didn’t know I needed to hear that right now.”
She adds: “I hope that’s what our letters show – how you can do it yourself by reflecting more about why you are reading and what it is giving you.”
Germaine Leece and Sonya Tsakalakis’ virtual Hong Kong International Literary Festival event, on Reading the Seasons: Books holding Life and Friendships Together, is part of the festival’s opening party on November 5 and takes place from 6.30pm-9pm.
