Reading in Community: What Book Clubs and Group Bibliotherapy Have Taught Me

For a large part of my life, especially when I was younger, reading was the most private thing I did. An opportunity to disappear into someone else’s sentences, who seemed to understand me, or whom I seemed to resonate with. I was free to pause over a line for as long as I wanted, free to cry over a paragraph without anybody watching me do it. Reading was where I went to be alone without feeling lonely, where I could embrace solitude to my heart’s content.

My first experience of a book club, I was not sure what to expect. Would if feel like a literature lesson at school, which I always looked forward to! Or a dinner party with familiar friends? The most notable thing I could remember is that I said something about a character that I wholehearted resonated with and that I had not consciously recognised while I had been reading, and another person from the book club sitting at a 40 degree angle to me began nodding as if I had just described her own life back to her.

I still remember the how I felt during that whole experience. I have since then (and especially since launching my bibliotherapy practice) spent many hours running reading groups: informal book clubs, more structured bibliotherapy circles, and the corporate workshop group sessions, where people have felt similarly and beyond that found community, exchanging phone numbers, emails and also lifelong memories of reading and beyond.

I have seen people exchange telephone numbers and email addresses after a session. I have watched new communities begin to form around a shared story. I have also witnessed people exchange something less tangible but equally valuable: memories of the books that accompanied them through childhood, bereavement, illness, parenthood, heartbreak, transition and renewal.

These experiences have taught me that reading does not lose its intimacy when we bring it into a community. Instead, it acquires another layer. The private relationship between the reader and the book remains, but it becomes part of a wider conversation in which we can feel not only understood by literature, but also seen by one another.

Fiction gives us a degree of emotional distance. It allows us to examine experiences that feel personal, painful or complicated without requiring us to disclose everything about ourselves. We can speak about a character’s choices, relationships and emotions while privately deciding how much of our own story we are ready to bring into the room.

This is one of the reasons shared reading can feel so freeing. Nobody has to begin by confessing directly, “I need to talk about my mother,” or, “I am struggling to ask for help.” The story has already introduced the subject. It gives the group a common language through which deeply personal experiences can be approached with care.

I remember facilitating a session centred on a novel about a woman rebuilding her life after her husband left her for someone younger. As we discussed the story, the protagonist’s stubborn refusal to ask for help came up repeatedly.

At first, the group spoke about this quality as part of the character’s personality. Gradually, however, the conversation shifted. Several members began to recognise aspects of the same reluctance in themselves. For different reasons, they had avoided seeking mental-health support for what they were experiencing.

Through discussing the choices available to the protagonist, the readers were able to explore what makes asking for help so difficult: fear of judgement, the desire to appear capable, uncertainty about where to turn and the belief that other people’s needs are more important than our own.

Some members left the session feeling more able to seek support outside the group. At the same time, they knew that they could continue to support one another through the connections they had formed within it.

The novel had provided more than a mirror. It had offered a kind of rehearsal space in which asking for help could first be imagined before it was attempted in real life.

The isolating grief of hard experiences: loss, illness, the ending of a marriage, changes in identity, the particular loneliness of anxiety is rarely talked about and can make you feel that you are the only one going through this. However when you come together in a themed bibliotherapy group or shared reading club, discussing loss and transition, you realise you are not alone and that someone else understands what you went through because they walked that very same path. You feel seen, heard, understood, validated and this creates one of the most powerful pathways to healing.

Then there’s the connection with the book, memoir, or novel that narrates a similar story to yourself also counters that loneliness in its own way; you meet a character whose story resonates with your own and you feel connected with your own grief and sadness. This is relieving in itself. Then there is a feeling of being witnessed both within the group and within the boundaries of the book, which has an incredibly therapeutic and empowering feeling.

In addition, the memoir may give language to an experience we have never been able to articulate. A novel may introduce us to a character whose grief resembles our own. A poem may express in a few lines what we have spent months trying to understand.

Finding our experience reflected in literature can be relieving in itself. But something changes when that recognition is voiced in a group. Their experience is witnessed by people who are present and able to respond in real time.

Together, both forms of recognition, the book and the group can create a powerful sense of belonging. They remind us that difficult experiences do not have to be carried entirely in private, and the shared experience is part of the healing process.

Shared reading often results in different responses and perspectives to the same story. In fact, some of the richest conversations begin when readers disagree.

One person may admire a character’s independence while another sees emotional withdrawal. One reader may interpret a character’s silence as strength; somebody else may understand it as fear. A decision that appears brave to one member of the group may seem reckless to another. Every reader brings a personal history to the conversation and narrative being discussed. Our relationships, losses, cultural backgrounds, memories and hopes all influence what we notice and how we interpret it.

Listening to another person’s perspective can therefore reveal something not only about the book, but also about ourselves. We may begin to understand why a particular character provoked such a strong reaction in us. We might recognise that the quality we criticised in the story is one we find difficult to accept in ourselves or in somebody close to us.

As a facilitator, I have learned that a meaningful reading group requires this kind of variety of perspectives, curiosity, and open-mindedness.

That openness can gently expand the boundaries of our own understanding. We are invited to see the story, and sometimes our own lives, through another perspective, another person’s eyes and even a character’s eyes. This is what researchers sometimes term Theory of Mind, the ability to switch perspective and ways of seeing and empathy accordingly.

A bibliotherapy group should never demand personal disclosure. Nobody should feel obliged to reveal more than they wish to simply because a story has touched on a sensitive subject. The goal is to create a space in which honesty, openness and acceptance is possible.

Sometimes a participant will speak directly about their own experience. At other times, they may discuss a character’s experience that might resemble their own, allowing them to safely explore this. Both forms of participation are valid.

A restorative group also makes room for silence. Not every response arrives immediately in words. A person may need time to sit with a question, return to a passage or listen while somebody else expresses what they have not yet been able to say. I have come to appreciate these pauses. It often means that something meaningful is being explore or digested, even if in silence.

The facilitator’s role is to hold this space with sensitivity: to encourage reflection without pressing for revelation, to welcome different interpretations and to help the group listen without rushing to advise or fix one another. (If you are interested in become a facilitator for a book club or group bibliotherapy, you might be interested in our Online Group Bibliotherapy Skills Course.)

When those conditions are present, the group moves beyond a space where books are discussed. In this space people can encounter experiences from different perspectives, practise speaking about difficult feelings and discover that they do not have to understand everything alone.

I still value solitary reading as deeply as I did when I was younger. I still love the freedom of being alone with a book, lingering over a sentence and allowing a story to reach me in the comfort of my own privacy. This remains important to me. But it is also important for me and my client to know that there is also another space available: one with a circle of different voices.

Reading in community has shown me that books can connect us not only to writers and characters, but also to the people beside us. They give us a shared language for experiences that might otherwise remain private, and recognise ourselves in one another.

And sometimes the most restorative part of reading in community is discovering that, when we stop exploring ourselves through the pages and narrative of the books, and look up, somebody else is there too with us.

If you would like to experience the restorative power of shared reading, I would love to welcome you to The Restorative Novel Escape designed in collaboration with Anacho Escapes at the Camden Arts Centre in Hampstead, London NW3, on Tuesday 13 October 2026, from 9.15am to 4pm.

It will be an opportunity to step away from the demands of everyday life and experience what can happen when we give ourselves the time and space to read, reflect and connect with others.

Bijal Shah is a bibliotherapist and the founder of Book Therapy. Her book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, is available now. If you would like a personalised book prescription or to explore bibliotherapy sessions, visit booktherapy.io.

And if you’d like to explore a curated library of books prescribed for every season of life, you can subscribe here: bookprescriptions.booktherapy.io