doubt existing within faith

I ended up relating to this memoir's general commentary on mental health stigmas and the church. While this author specifically deals with and writes about her experience as a Christian living with bipolar disorder, and I've identified as a Christian who lives with OCD, I appreciated many of Gazmarian's connections to her lived situation, biblical stories, and, you guessed it, doubt. There are several instances in which she cites the Gospels, Old Testament, and New Testament texts to specifically align them with some sort of anecdote in her own life. The narrator is someone who grew up in the Evangelical tradition, and recounts many a time where their diagnosed disorder caused them to seriously question their view of faith. I read this book for a Nonfiction class, and will be meeting the author at a visiting writer event this fall, so getting to discuss various craft moves and opinions with my classmates has shaped my overall perspective on what this memoir attempts to accomplish. I disappointedly must say that every time the author seemed about to crack open a really profound and vulnerable anecdote relating to her struggle with faith and mental health identity, she'd back off and move onto another topic entirely. It turned into a pretty predictable pattern, which made the memoir a relatively easy read, but I wanted to get into the nitty gritty, kind of ugly stuff that the author seemed to want to tiptoe around. I completely understand and respect that when a writer sets out to write a memoir, they have every right to tell their story in the precise way they see fit. I know editors and publishers end up having a pretty big say in concluding matters as well, and this book was picked up by the renowned Simon & Schuster. So even though there are more complex, behind-the-scenes decisions to consider, I wanted to dive deeper into Gazmarian's overall opinion on how the church approaches Christians' mental health struggles. She seems to sort of exist in a vacuum, self-contained to her own world and, eventually, the world of her husband David and the marriage they create for themselves. I did really appreciate how every medication the author was on was listed and explained, that understanding how they affected the author's ability to function or make decisions was paramount to the narrative. As a result, though, some of that vacuum-effect seems to be heightened. But, there isn't a lot of drama to how she tells her story, which I highly appreciate, seeing how such drama could accentuate a story that doesn't need all sorts of glitz and glam to have profound impact. In general, a book like this is delicate since the author still has to interact with the characters she writes about, like her parents, friends, husband, and church congregations. The funny thing about nonfiction is how relationships like these end up affecting how the story gets told. I'm looking forward to meeting and picking Gazmarian's brain for details she may have included in a first draft but had to sacrifice for the sake of edits.

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