This book is about ghosts and gods and flying saucers; certainty in the absence of knowledge; how the stories we tell ourselves to deal with the distance between the world as it is and as we’d like it to be can stunt us or save us.
Sarah Krasnostein is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, which won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Australian Book Industry Award for General Non-Fiction and was longlisted for the Walkley Book Award, among others. It was phenomenally successful and a hard act to follow. And yet Krasnostein has done so in The Believer, with her trademark compassion and empathy.
Krasnostein spent the last four years in Australia and the US talking to some extraordinary people – people holding fast to belief, even as it rubs against the grain of more accepted realities. Some of them believe in things most people don’t. Ghosts. UFOs. Heaven and the Devil. The literal creation of the universe in six days. Some of them believe in things most people would like to. Dying with autonomy. Spending half your life in prison for protecting your child and yet still believing in a just God. Krasnostein explores what happens when their beliefs crash into her own.
This is an intensely personal and gorgeously written book. Krasnostein has a rare gift in her ability to hold space for her interview subjects. Her approach is sensitive and respectful, without judgment, as they share details of their beliefs and experiences that are often devoid of any scientific certainty. She explores her own doubts, and searches for something familiar in the unfamiliar. In doing so she has produced an important and timely read. What happens when our beliefs separate us? What is it that continues to unite us? It is simply that we’re all trying to find meaning in the world?
I was moved deeply in parts, uncomfortable in others. I’ve questioned my own beliefs extensively since finishing the book and have found myself regularly thinking about the people interviewed. In particular, Annie the death doula. The Believer tipped me upside down while I was reading it, and now, a week after finishing, it’s still haunting me.
A stunning accomplishment from a truly excellent writer.
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