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.
