A Love Story of Doubt: a review of Anna Gazmarian’s DEVOUT, A MEMOIR OF DOUBT by Kelly Tanner-Backenroth

Devout, a Memoir of Doubt
Anna Gazmarian
Simon and Schuster
178 pp

 “The message was clear: Doubt was an enemy…[In] a live action Christian TV show called Bibleman…Doubt is a personified villain with a cape, the archnemesis of the show’s hero, who has a six-pack.”

When Jesus declines to take the wheel, and trust in science leaves her sick and shamed, Anna Gazmarian is forced to save herself in Devout, a Memoir of Doubt. Gazmarian’s debut memoir stands refreshingly apart from other works with similar themes of mental health and a religious childhood, in this case late 20th century evangelical Christianity in North Carolina. The narrator wrestles with a crisis of faith while simultaneously navigating mental health issues. She must advocate for her own wellbeing after a Bipolar II diagnosis leaves her suddenly isolated from her so-called support systems: religious and medical communities, friends and family, and even her own mind. What does it mean to belong, if being a woman, a person with a treatment-resistant mental health condition, a person with doubt, makes you an outsider?  

In her preface, Gazmarian tells her reader “what this book is: a prayer and a lament, offered in the hope of restoration.” Yet as the reader follows the narrator from church youth group to doctor’s office, from backyard sermon to ketamine infusion, what emerges is a search for self. “Another way of saying this is that my faith lacked agency,” she writes. Faith requires trust, and the search for where to place that trust, and how to claim agency over oneself, is the journey Gazmarian defines as she seeks restoration.

Gazmarian wrestles with these questions in part by walking her reader through bible stories and passages that she finds meaningful along the way. As she finds again and again that the saviors she had hoped for were not up to the challenge, she starts to encounter people who broaden her perspective on the meaning of devotion. These allies are a relief when they emerge on the page – a (finally) competent psychiatrist, the narrative voice of the poet Mary Oliver, an accepting man, a joyful child. The fragility of the young protagonist, unable to find solace inside or outside of her own head, contrasts notably with the confident narrative voice as the writer looks back on her coming-of-age. The community Gazmarian seeks is found on the page and among writers. A poetry class becomes a kind of church, and a silent moment with a fellow writer friend a kind of prayer.

“To accept the new life you’re being offered, you have to let go of your old life. You have to let go of your illusions,” Gazmarian writes. This is quite a different idea than restoration, which implies a return or rebuilding of what was before. Instead, the writer emerges as her own hero, cartoon villains set aside for something far more depthful. This book is not a memoir about shedding belief, or doubt, or triumph over illness. It is instead a kind of love story, a reclaiming of self that culminates in the words that the reader holds in their hands.

 Devout, a Memoir of Doubt is Anna Gazmarian’s first book.

Kelly Tanner-Backenroth holds an MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction from Bennington College, and a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Literature from NYU. She works in Human Resources. Her short stories and memoir have been published in the journals Pigeon Pages, Black Fox Literary Magazine and Dovetail.