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A review by lizshayne
Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
I have got to stop reading books that upset me on Shabbat, I'm beginning to suspect that it's assur.
This book is not so much intentionally upsetting, but inevitably upsetting because it talks about our failures to perceive truth, the need to perform truth in the way that best matches the other person's idea of what your truth ought to look like, the way we as a western society have turned the gotcha into an art form and what happens to people who are disbelieved.
It's a really hard book, for all that it's a very difficult book to stop reading. It's a book that leaves me simultaneously energized and depleted; I want to support those pushing for change and I want us to talk and think about what is invested in presenting the other as a con man trying to take what is ours rather than a fellow trying to convey their unknowable soul.
I feel like I'm spending a lot of time this Elul thinking about obligation and I wish I knew where it was going.
Also, shout out to Nayeri for the way she talks about autism and her own suspicions about her neurotype. It makes a lot of sense to me that it takes an autistic person to unpack the ways that natural behaviors...aren't and how our assumptions about the culture that taught us how to express emotions and convey stories can absolutely hinder us when the things we assume are "what humans do" turn out to be socially constructed.
This book is not so much intentionally upsetting, but inevitably upsetting because it talks about our failures to perceive truth, the need to perform truth in the way that best matches the other person's idea of what your truth ought to look like, the way we as a western society have turned the gotcha into an art form and what happens to people who are disbelieved.
It's a really hard book, for all that it's a very difficult book to stop reading. It's a book that leaves me simultaneously energized and depleted; I want to support those pushing for change and I want us to talk and think about what is invested in presenting the other as a con man trying to take what is ours rather than a fellow trying to convey their unknowable soul.
I feel like I'm spending a lot of time this Elul thinking about obligation and I wish I knew where it was going.
Also, shout out to Nayeri for the way she talks about autism and her own suspicions about her neurotype. It makes a lot of sense to me that it takes an autistic person to unpack the ways that natural behaviors...aren't and how our assumptions about the culture that taught us how to express emotions and convey stories can absolutely hinder us when the things we assume are "what humans do" turn out to be socially constructed.