Devout: A Memoir of Doubt by Anna Gazmarian
Simon & Schuster, 2024
Review by Alyssa Witbeck
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Anna Gazmarian, in her debut memoir Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, speaks of Bible characters as though they are her close friends. She writes them in the present tense. At three months old, Gazmarian was baptized into Christianity, and so for a lifetime, these characters were more than just names on a page; they were, as was the rest of her faith and Christian community, “the organizing principle around which everything else was ordered.” And yet, being born into religion and baptized shortly after birth made her feel that her “faith lacked agency,” which ultimately led her to be rebaptized as a first-year student in college. The act of cleansing herself again was an act of devotion, of faith. Six months later, her attempt at straightforward zealousness was confounded with a bipolar disorder diagnosis. Everything changed.
Within the opening pages, Gazmarian makes it clear what she sets out to do. “That’s what this book is: a prayer and a lament, offered in the hope of restoration.” Leslie Jamison praises that Devout is “always attuned to the possibilities of community and spiritual sustenance, even as it refuses to efface the struggles at its core—believing that this struggle, too, can be a thing of beauty.”
In the throes of learning how to stabilize her mental health and make it through Christian college, Gazmarian leans into the boogeyman of Doubting Christianity. Gazmarian shows how abstract concepts like doubt and faith can be personified at church, and how their presence lingers as something to either hide from or embody. Throughout the memoir, Gazmarian redefines “Doubt” from what starts on page two as an enemy and becomes an ever present—and welcome—companionship to faith. Her faith, which once rooted her “coherent worldview” becomes more abstract, but nonetheless meaningful. At one point, she tells her husband David, “I don’t know what I believe about hell or about a lot of things. I’m learning to be okay with that.” Processing and treating her bipolar disorder guide her to not only be gentler with herself and her own uncertainties but also to bring ambiguity into her faith. As a child, “The idea of having a faith that felt certain seemed like the entire purpose of life.” When she begins deconstructing her worldview, she anchors herself in a part of faith she was taught to avoid: lament.
Gazmarian finds the only thing that helps her feel “less alone” is writing “fragmented recollections of [her] own history.” This strategy is not well received by those around her who encourage her to cheer up and think of life as positive, forward momentum. She recounts a story from Genesis, where Lot and his wife are forced to flee their home in search of safety. Lot’s wife “looks back on her way out of the city.” God turns her into a pillar of salt. Gazmarian writes, “She became a memorial, a warning symbol to those like me, prone to ruminate on the past.”
Despite the looming warning of meditating too much on one’s life, Gazmarian argues, “Can any of us ever be truly free from the ideas that shape us?” Jesus, she writes, was not without lament. “Even Jesus himself after the resurrection is still marked by the wounds of crucifixion.” Gazmarian marks herself too, with a tattoo of an olive tree. A tree that exists in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed the night before his crucifixion. “The tattoo reminds me,” she writes, “that without lament, there isn’t much reason for hope.” She carries with her, on her body and in the pages of her memoir, the nuance and interconnectedness of faith and Doubt, hope and lament.
When she forgets to sign up for college classes on time, Gazmarian enrolls in a poetry class. She’s drawn to poetry in part because it feels like “an extension of the therapeutic work” she’s doing, and also because there are still open seats. Early on in the class, she finds that “poetry gave me the freedom to question, to Doubt, to lament—to engage with God as the person I was, not as the person I thought I had to be.” Poetry becomes a prayer and a calling. Ever since her first poetry course, Gazmarian feels “called to write,” and views writing as a “calling that I could not shake.” Those poetry classes led her to an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and, eventually, to this debut memoir.
Gazmarian does not look away from the problems and pain that arise within Christianity, nor from people who leave religion. She articulates to her editor, Yahdon Israel, that “This book is written for those who have distanced themselves from faith due to hypocrisy, broken institutions, corruption, and trauma.” She continues, “At the same time, this book is for those who continue to return to faith while deconstructing what Christianity means to them, sometimes with the inability to fully articulate what brings them back to God.”
As a reader who falls into the first category, someone who used to be a member of a high-demand religion but left, I knew that I was approaching this memoir without a clean slate. I prepared to feel like an outsider, worried that the book would carry a subtle insinuation that I hadn’t wrestled long or hard enough because Gazmarian maintains her affiliation to religion, and I lost mine. Instead, I felt held in the struggle. I agree with her conclusion that “[e]ven those who choose to walk away from faith have an identity formed by renunciation—I’m not convinced that they ever fully rid themselves of the past.” We’re all still ruminating; we’re all marked by the same wounds.
Gazmarian finds a community that I wish was more accessible to people, a way into church that, in my Doubt, I longed for. She considers, “church, at its best, is meant to carry God’s presence into the world—to make the idea of God more trustworthy … Being part of this community didn’t heal me, but it did point me toward a God who could be trusted, a God who met us in our frailty.”
Devout is a needed bridge between the faithful and the apostates. It reaches out to readers across the spectrum of believers and non-believers and connects us through shared humanity. It demonstrates why Gazmarian chooses to stay without demonizing those who walk away. She feels closeness to Bible characters as though they are her friends, and after reading this thoughtfully intimate memoir, Gazmarian feels like a friend, too.
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Anna Gazmarian holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Rumpus, Longreads, The Sun, and The Guardian. Anna works for The Sun Magazine and lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina.
Alyssa Witbeck holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Montana where she was an editor for CutBank. Her work is published in Mayday, Fiction Attic Press, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. Her essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and won the Original Utah Writing Competition. Based in Utah, she teaches university English composition courses. She crochets an excessive number of stuffed animals, for no real reason. Find her online @alyssawitbeck.
ID: Cover of Devout by Anna Gazmarian.
Psaltery & Lyre 