Anna Gazmarian explores faith and fear in her debut memoir, Devout (Simon & Schuster, 2024), a poignant portrayal of religious trauma, mental health, and survival. Born into a family who belonged to an evangelical church, Gazmarian was baptized as an infant, consumed religious media, and spent most of her life devoted to her faith community. Occasionally struggling with doubts, she was taught to suppress her questions and pour herself into the practice of prayer and study.
After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in college, Gazmarian’s relationship with the church proved unsustainable, as many members of her faith community viewed mental illness as the result of sin. She reckoned with a years-long struggle to manage her mental health while deconstructing her inherited worldview.
In Devout, Gazmarian enters discussion of subjects previously considered to be taboo with the honesty and complexity not granted to her in previous church communities. Without any intention of tearing down faith communities, her aim is clear: to forge new understandings of faith, the Bible, and herself. As she writes in the preface of Devout, the book is:“. . . a prayer and a lament, offered in the hope of restoration.”
I first read Gazmarian’s essay, “Sins of the Mother,” in The Sun,where she writes about growing up with a faith that was rooted in fear of punishment and questions how to avoid this as she raises her daughter in the church. As a former Catholic, I related to the childhood worry of being deemed unworthy of salvation. I, too, had experienced how religious-based anxieties can resurface in adulthood.
I was honored to speak with Gazmarian over Zoom about creating a nuanced portrait of the evangelical church, writing to her daughter, and what it means to be devout.
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The Rumpus: From the opening chapters, I was impressed by how Devout describes important dynamics of the evangelical faith. Was it tricky to capture this worldview and tell an engaging story at the same time? How did you approach the balance of sharing too much versus too little?
Anna Gazmarian: This book has been several years in process, and my idea of it has morphed throughout that time. One of the reasons I did not want to write about evangelical culture is because there’s a language of faith that is very insular and people outside the community cannot relate to it. I had to find a new language for how I explained faith because I didn’t want the book to be geared strictly towards Christians. I wanted to write about faith in a way that people who are not Christian, or do not understand that worldview, could read and have a more nuanced approach to faith. At the same time, I wanted people who know the church to read and relate to it.
It was a difficult balance to strike. One thing that helped was writing the book in several different layers. The first layer was my personal experiences. Then, pieces, like Bible verses came much later, in one of the last drafts. The Bible verses were hard for me to incorporate because I don’t read the Bible anymore, and my understanding of it has changed. However, I wanted to capture the nature of religious trauma. Even if the Bible has been used against me, it formed who I am and how I look at the world.
Now there’s this culture in which Trump has turned religion into something without nuance— “it’s all or nothing” thinking. The same judgment evangelicals show the world is also being shown to religious people. There’s no understanding or nuance about what it means to be in a church. It was important for me to capture what a healthy dynamic with religion looks like. Something that was really hard for me as a writer—one reason I can’t read reviews—is that no matter what I do, I can’t make everyone happy. I’m going to piss off someone who doesn’t believe in God, or I’m going to piss off someone who’s Christian. I had to come to terms with what I wanted the book to be instead of what other people wanted it to be.
Rumpus: You write how Job and Moses, characters from the Bible, were easier to see in a new light after you received your bipolar disorder diagnosis. By retelling their stories in present tense, do you think they became more incorporated into the logic of the book?
Gazmarian: When I was in grad school, I didn’t know what lens to approach the Bible. In the majority of books written about grappling with evangelicalism, there’s a level of condemnation. In my early drafts, that’s the approach I took. I was on the defense, and I was trying to reach an answer of what I believed about God. I thought writing the book would help me find answers. I’d spent most of my life studying theology and looking at other people to tell me what to believe. In the writing process, my editor told me, “This book isn’t going to get you answers, and leaning on other people for answers isn’t going to do anything.”
My editor had the idea to incorporate a Bible story in each chapter and extend the stories to show how they shaped my life. I took out a piece of paper and listed off the chapters, and I could immediately bullet point which story would go with each chapter. That’s just how my mind works: things happen, and my mind goes to a scripture passage.
It was important for me to have these stories in the present tense. During the editorial process, my editor said, “This is in the past.” In my head, these are people I’ve studied and feel like I’ve done life with. I wanted that to be honored, and I wanted it to have a haunting quality.
For me, the scariest part with incorporating the scriptures is questioning the stories and what they mean. There’s a poem by Christian Wiman, where he talks about being called a heretic. The scariest part about writing this book, as someone who identifies as a Christian, is that there’s this burden—what if what I claim about faith is wrong? What is God going to think about me if I reach conclusions that aren’t real? I had to let that go.
Rumpus: Another strong thread in the book is a desire to find belonging among different communities, inside and outside of church. How did you approach writing about different relationships for the purpose of the book?
Gazmarian: I think a large part of this book was a love letter to the people who got me through one of the darkest seasons of my life. Even if those people are not necessarily in my life anymore, I want to honor who they were, how they served me at that time, and how they got me through. It was an interesting balance to find because I also wanted to capture the isolation and the loneliness of mental illness. In earlier chapters, I wanted to make readers grapple with that feeling of being alone and then to gradually expand as I’m learning to live with my illness.
As a Christian, I’m writing from a place of kindness. Bret Lott has an essay called “On Precision,” and he talks, as a Christian and a writer, about how to write from a place of kindness instead of condemnation. That process took several drafts. I could have written from a place of bitterness or unforgiveness, but I feel like I was able to get past those feelings because I wrote the book.
Rumpus: There’s also the important relationship in the final chapter of the book, which switches to a direct address to your child. Why did that feel like the right way to end the story?
Gazmarian: When I signed the book deal, I was nine months pregnant, and I was on the phone with my now-editor. He hadn’t read my book. I told him about it, and he just said, “The book ends with your daughter.”I didn’t understand it at the time because my daughter wasn’t even born. I came home from the hospital with her and wrote and edited this book throughout her life.
For so long, it felt like I was writing this book to my younger self, but after having my daughter, it felt like I was writing to her and showing her what it meant to reclaim the darkest parts of your life and heal from those things. That’s something I want her to see. I want her to see the compassion I’ve extended to my younger self, and I want her to have that.
After having her, I started grappling with what it means to raise a child in religion and how I want to do things differently. I tried writing a chapter about my pregnancy and her being born, and it didn’t feel like the right tone. I said to my editor, “This isn’t right.” He said, “Why don’t you try writing a letter to Ezra and see what happens?”And I did—that’s how it ended.
Rumpus: I loved how you described the college poetry class as similar to how a healthy church should look. You write: “. . . the group connected over our desire to understand and accept suffering.” In writing Devout, did your process function the same way? Was any of it church-like?
Gazmarian: There were several moments. For my final draft, I worked with my best friend. I was not in a good mental place. The book wore me down a lot. I needed someone I trusted to go through the book with me. Up until that point, there was something intimate about working with my editor. It felt like I was almost writing to God and grappling with my faith on the page. It was emotionally taxing, but in a good way. I wanted to have someone to walk through it with me, so my friend and I stayed up every night for months, drank a bunch of sparkling water, and walked through every scene of the book. It was one of the most healing and growing experiences. My friend grew up differently than I did—he’s in a different place in his faith and has experienced less religious trauma—so he’s able to grapple with scripture in a way that I cannot.
I was writing this book and editing in a very hopeless place, but the book is hopeful. Working with my friend helped me reclaim that hope. After writing the book, I decided to step away from church, but I have found so many places that feel like what church is supposed to be. I go to a gym with all these incredible women, and they’ve walked through so many things with me. I think writing the book has challenged what I think the church is and what it’s supposed to be. It goes far beyond a building that meets on Sunday mornings. It’s something that can extend into all of your relationships regardless if the people are religious or not.
I went to a psychiatric facility after writing the book, which I’m very open about. And while I was there, I got about thirty letters from women at my gym, in which they didn’t try to pathologize me or anything. They were like, “This fucking sucks. Here’s a funny card.” It’s been really healing and expanded my view of God. The early church met in houses rather than huge congregations. It’s also hard to be part of a congregation right now, politically.
Rumpus: The title, Devout, would not have been a word I would associate with a book that wrestles with and questions religion. What is your relationship with the title? And what does it mean to be devout?
Gazmarian: The original title was Consider the Weight of It. It was a line of poetry I wrote many years after undergrad, about the weight of suffering. Whenever people asked how depression felt, all I could say was, “It’s a weight. It’s a physical weight.”
My editor and the marketing team said we needed to change the title. It’s funny what writing teaches you about yourself. When I wrote this book, I had no compassion for my younger self, the evangelical self. I thought, “That person didn’t believe in the God that I believe in now.” I was very critical. During the first meeting I had with my editor, he said, “Everything that happens in this book is a step of faith.” That reframed the way I looked at the book: as a kind of testimony.
I think devotion and doubt are confusing. For me in the past, “devout” would imply righteousness or lack of doubt. I had this model of faith growing up, where faith equated with certainty. Now, faith equates to accepting the uncertainty, moving forward, in spite of the uncertainty, and believing things that cannot be proven. I talk about this in the book: faith and God are these things I can’t escape. Regardless of how far I move away from them, there’s this devotion and longing that always makes me come back. I always know that I’m going to come back. That’s hard to explain to people who do not believe in God.
I read this review that said, “She never proves that there’s a God.” In the beginning, that’s what I thought this book had to do. I thought, “Well, I have to prove to everyone there’s a God,” but you can’t. That’s the point: how do you accept and move forward, grounding your life in something you can’t prove? I think that’s what being devout means: dedication among longing, doubt, questions—it is the endless process of moving forward and sometimes back. It is wandering through the wilderness never knowing when it will end. It is looking at the overwhelming nature of a suffering world and holding onto the reality that goodness exists.
Rumpus: Are you reading any good books lately?
Gazmarian: I’m reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and that’s amazing. I’m looking at my bookshelf right now—I’m reading This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz, and I’m reading Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton, which is a history of an insane asylum during Jim Crow era. I love novels by poets, and I would love to write a novel.
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Author photograph by Jo Lindsay
