Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough

by Dina Nayeri

The prizewinning author of The Ungrateful Refugee asks who is believed in our society, who is not - and why?

'An ambitious and moving exploration of the borders we draw around credible victimhood that will cement Nayeri's position as a master storyteller of the refugee experience' Guardian

Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability in our society. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture?

As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.

'An important, courageous, brilliant book'
Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland

'Dina Nayeri asks an incredibly important question, and the answers she finds are crucial for all of us'
Oliver Bullough, bestselling author of Butler to the World

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Memoir, Sociology, History, Politics, Social Justice

286 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 7, 2023

About the author

Dina Nayeri is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard Business School, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She spends her time in New York and Iowa City.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup

--------------------------------------

The truth isn’t enough. Most people aren’t even listening for it.

Agent Mulder knew that the truth was out there. But what can one do about those who are incapable or unwilling to see it, or worse, those who have a vested interest in disbelief? And how much responsibility to persuade the unpersuadable must be carried by those whose truth is in question? Aliens do figure large in this book, but not in the Mulder/Scully mode.


Dina Nayeri - image from LitHub

Dina Nayeri has been writing about the truth since at least 2012, with a particular emphasis on immigrant issues, more specifically, on refugees, asylum seekers. Her previous book, The Waiting Place, released in 2022, documented life in Katsikas, a Greek refugee camp, mixing tales from the lives of some of the children there with her own experiences as a refugee from Iran. In The Ungrateful Refugee, 2019, she writes of adult refugees she has met, looking at what being a refugee is like for them. She has also written novels and short fiction, centered on the refugee experience. And that is her primary focus here as well.

The aim of that book [The Ungrateful Refugee] was to really look back on my own experience, and what people go through now to make some sense of the modern displacement experience. One of the sections of the book is about asylum storytelling, and I had so many stories of people getting disbelieved for the stupidest reasons, and the way that the asylum officers listen to the stories. It was very shocking. I wanted to write a lot more about that and, with this book, I wanted to expand that out to just how the vulnerable are listened to, versus people who are very privileged. - from the Ms Magazine interview

In Who Gets Believed, Nayeri takes on a broader perspective. She looks at the challenges people face in trying to get their truths believed not only in refugee situations but in many other walks of life.
There are two factual threads that bind the book together, weaving in and out over the course of three hundred or so pages. First is the tale of K, a Tamil torture victim whose evidence includes a back full of scars. Somehow the system tries to persuade itself that K did that to himself in order to gain entry to the UK. If this sounds Kafkaesque to you, it does to Nayeri, as well. She frequently cites that patron saint of bureaucratic horror as she takes us through the nightmare world of mindlessness, and barely disguised racism, sexism, and xenophobia that is the West’s immigration system. It makes a powerful metaphor for how the system treats those whose rights are supposedly guaranteed by international treaty, but who are more typically treated as rightless, and suspect supplicants.

For most migrants [asylum attorney Maleha Haq] explained, credibility isn’t the reason for rejection. In fact, the issue of credibility is cleverly avoided by using the claimant’s own lack of knowledge about the definition of a word. What is a refugee? Before he is believed, an asylum seeker must choose the right story out of many, the relevant part of a complicated life. It’s like being asked to cut a circular disk from a cylinder. You have many stacked circles, but if you cut at the wrong angle, you have an oval. You’ve failed to present the desired thing.

Another thread is her brother-in-law, someone with a lifetime of mental health issues. Making the credibility tale personal, she writes about not believing he was really incapable of providing for himself in the world, seeing him as a leech on his family, a con-artist working the system. This is a powerful approach, bringing in real-world issues, but with names and faces, and humanizing the core questions even more by weaving in how disbelief, even her own, has impacted her life.

One of the many strengths of the book is Nayeri’s commentary on communication. She tells how language is used as a tool of obfuscation and exclusion. Refugees must learn the nuances of the immigration system in order to gain entrance. They must learn to play the game, memorize the exact right words to use, be ready to offer the right presentation. The unpolished truth is typically fraught with openings that officials, whose default is rejection, (UK Home Office workers are given target numbers for rejecting asylum seekers.) can seize on to deny asylum. It is disheartening to learn that the prospects of a refugee gaining asylum correspond very closely with whether they have legal counsel or not, which bodes ill for most. Again Nayeri offers a personal element, reporting on her experiences with having to learn not just what, but how to present, in order to get what she wanted, whether acceptance to a college of her choice, or a job, post college.

Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed—how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts.

The cost to refugees is clearly higher but the parallels in how one must approach large systems with language resonates like Big Ben at the top of the hour.

…belonging is a performance with a script

Nayeri looks as well at a bit of the world of medicine. She notes that many caregivers disparage sufferers of Sickle Cell Disease, who must repeatedly seek help with pain issues, as “Sicklers,” refusing to take seriously the very real pain experienced by those afflicted. And she notes caregiver disparagement of different ways of grieving in different cultures.

She has a tale of her own about her doctors refusing to treat her the way she wanted, as a reflection of how many doctors do not take seriously the wishes and pain reports of many women patients. This one resonated personally. In late 2021, my own sister experienced this, as, for months, she had complained of pain, but was sent home from each medical visit (when she could even get one. Sometimes this entailed months of waiting.) with little or no relief, and no real examination, certainly no effective one, of underlying causation. After all, she was just an old lady, and old people have pain all the time. No big whoop. The pain finally became too much and she was rushed to the ER. Subsequent surgery revealed a return of a stomach cancer after a ten-year-remission, nicely metastasized. She was dead within weeks. The risk entailed in medical professionals ignoring claims of pain is very real.

She takes on The Reid Technique, a widely used interrogation regimen routinely abused by police, with a chargeable outcome being a much higher priority than truth-seeking. She looks at how the methodology is used to generate inconsistencies, which are then portrayed as evidence of dishonesty. The obverse of this is firefighters being granted exceptional credibility when testifying as expert witnesses, despite there sometimes being little scientific merit to what is claimed on the stand.

The Reid Technique begins with an assumption of guilt. It was originally intended to be used only when the interrogator is absolutely certain of guilt. Even then, it was intended not to extract a confession that might condemn the suspect on its own (the technique is, after all, so torturous that even its creators didn’t believe it would cause an innocent person to confess, they seemed aware of that risk), but to uncover new, unknown details—intimate ones about the why and the how—that could then be corroborated. It was that supporting physical evidence that would convict the guilty—a body, a weapon, some real proof.

It might be easy to intone a general rule of Trust No One, but refugees do not have that luxury. Unless an asylum-seeker can somehow get legal representation, they are forced to trust people who are in a position to help or harm their cases.

There is plenty more in here, dives on how we persuade ourselves to believe thing that are not true, how politics creates truths, even alters our bodies, on how we only see what we are looking for, how having stories told publicly makes them more real, how consultants befuddle their clients. You will learn a lot. You will also feel a lot. Nayeri’s stories are moving, upsetting, and hopefully, motivating. They will force you to think, and, hopefully, engage in some introspection. Her willingness to own her own biases shows that she is not looking for justice solely in the world outside, but within herself. Red Smith famously said that writing was easy, All you do is sit down at a typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed. I imagine there was a lot of cleaning up necessary in Nayeri’s writing places while she worked on this book. Also, she is not trying to get you to like her. This is an honest portrayal of a complicated person, one who struggled trying to fit in with American society as a child, and who maneuvered the ivy halls of Harvard and Princeton, and a premier spot in the consultoverse, in her drive for success.

Who Gets Believed is a powerful look not just at the terrifying refugee experience, but at the wider problems of disbelief that are grounded in biased or unsupported notions. I Want To Believe that the issues raised in this book are being addressed, but while I expect that there are awareness programs being run by some healthcare provider institutions, I seriously doubt there is anything being done by police departments to cope with abuse of the Reid Technique. And I would bet that immigration services, swamped as they are with applicants, and chronically understaffed, are unlikely to have done much about basing asylum denials on firmer reasons than what appears the case today. The truth of what is happening in these parts of our world is definitely out there. Dina Nayeri has brought some of that truth to the rest of us. Belief is only needed if there is no proof. Nayeri offers evidence. These are truths you need to know.

this variability in judicial standards is one of the greatest flaws of the American asylum system. Why should the weight of any kind of evidence vary by judge? Should one’s fate depend on the compassion or politics of the judge assigned? Should it vary by administration?...asylum grant rates go up and down based on who the attorney general is. That’s not just at the judge level but at the screening stage. The number of people found to have credible fear and entitled to be seen by a judge depends on political pressure.

Review posted - 06/02/23

Publication dates
----------Hardcover – 03/07/23
----------Trade paperback - 03/5/24

I received a copy of Who Gets Believed? from Catapult in return for a fair review.



This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Profile - from Wikipedia
Nayeri was born in Isfahan, Iran. Her mother was a doctor and her father a dentist. She spent the first 8 years of her life in Isfahan but fled Iran with her mother and brother Daniel in 1988 because her mother had converted to Christianity and the moral police of the Islamic Republic had threatened her with execution.[1]Nayeri, her mother and brother spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers and eventually settled in Oklahoma, in the United States.[2] Her father remained in Iran, where he still lives. She has written several works of non-fiction, novels for adult and children, and numerous articles.

Links to the Nayeri’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Interviews
-----NPR - Dina Nayeri wants you to question 'Who Gets Believed' | Book of the Day - with Juana summers – audio - 8:44
-----Ms Magazine - Telling the ‘Right’ Story: Dina Nayeri on Refugee Credibility - by Jera Brown
-----LitHub - Manufacturing Lies: DinaNayeri on How Our Cultural and Bureaucratic Norms Often Betray the Truth with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan

Songs/Music
-----Weeknd - High for This- mentioned in Chapter 5

Items of Interest from the author
-----PBS - Is the distinction between migrant and refugee meaningful? - Video – 3:02
-----Muck Rack - Articles by Dina Nayeri - links to pieces in diverse publications

Items of Interest
-----NY Times - Many Women Have an Intense Fear of Childbirth, Survey Suggests by Roni Caryn Rabin
-----AP - Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy? One reason: Doctors don't take them seriously by Kat Stafford
-----Wisconsin Criminal Defense - Understanding the Reid Technique in Police Interrogations - The Law Offices of Christopher J. Cherella
-----Project Gutenberg - The Trial by Franz Kafka – full text for free

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC. It hasn't affected the content of my review.

This is a book that many, many people right now could benefit from reading and thinking very hard about, and then reflecting extra super hard about their life choices. (I am not excluded from this!)

I clicked "Request" on NetGalley for this one on an impulse, and I'm glad I did. The topic seemed interesting and relevant, and that turned out to very much be the case. I'm always curious about books like this that cover such broad topics, how they could possibly claim to cover all the available avenues of inquiry, and if they don't, how they choose to limit and structure their books. For Who Gets Believed? the author—a refugee from Iran who fled the country with her mother when she was eight because her mother was a Christian, and then became a refugee in middle America—the answer is that she weaves her personal narrative throughout, and covers topics that relate to things that she has experienced. Because her experience is much broader than the average citizen, she ends up covering a variety of subject matter, including the process of applying for asylum (mostly in the US and the UK), patient doctor interactions (with emphasis on drug-seeking behavior and women's healthcare), mental illness, family dynamics, and religious belief.

I would say Who Gets Believed? is about 50% memoir and what isn't memoir is influenced by it. This is a personal book, not an objective piece of journalism or academia. That said, it's obvious (especially given the subject matter) that credibility is important to the author for multiple reasons, so the non-fictional elements are always well supported with evidence, and when facts are unsure, that's always noted.

The reason I say that everyone should read this is because it is Nayeri's main point that we as humans, especially in the age of information technology where it is so easy to be fooled or taken in by false narratives, naturally rely too often on our own instincts, our heuristics, rather than on the more rational parts of our brain. There's a reason we have the ability to do both, think rationally and separately, and to take mental shortcuts. The two processes shore up each other's weaknesses. And when that balance is off, you get instances like the following: A young woman with the BCRA gene repeatedly asks a nurse to test her for breast cancer when having breast pain, and is refused and her concerns dismissed as anxiety, only to find out almost too late that she has one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, and she almost dies. That's some scary shit, and it should be paid attention to.

[4.5 stars]

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 3 out of 5]

A messy book about an important and timely topic.

I previously read The Ungrateful Refugee by this author and loved it: it’s a fabulous combination of memoir, journalistic account of modern-day refugees’ experiences, and thought piece on anti-refugee policies. This book picks up some of those same issues, but goes broader, examining the intersection of privilege and perceived credibility: from refugees, to criminal defendants and witnesses, to doctors and nurses dismissing the pain of marginalized groups, to the other side of the coin, where people sending the right status signals get believed even when they’re full of it. The author’s experiences as a high-powered New York management consultant at age 22 seem to bear this out.

So I do think, for some readers, this book will be worth a read for shining a light on that topic alone. I also happen to love Nayeri’s writing style: vigorous and intense but deeply considered, full of content but concise. But if you don’t know yet whether you love her style, you should definitely read The Ungrateful Refugee first to find out before tackling this. If you decide not to read further, you’ll have read the better book.

Because this book is all over the place, weaving together threads that seem to have nothing to do with each other. I’m still unconvinced all that detail about life with her partner and young child has a place in the book. The bit about whether glossolalia (speaking in tongues) is faked is a fascinating read, but seemed somewhat tangential. And the bit about clueless graduates of online nurse practitioner programs is horrifying, but has little to do with the topic at hand.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot that isn’t quite followed through on. A major thread deals with Nayeri’s brother-in-law, who commits suicide after many years of struggle with mental illness. Nayeri never believed he was sick, seemingly because he was otherwise too privileged for her to believe he could really suffer. Which could make a powerful starting point for a reflection on how her own biases impact her judgments, except she never actually reaches the point of “mea culpa,” or of drawing any conclusions about how she and others can avoid repeating this mistake. Even at the end of the book she’s still hedging about how she wasn’t the one making decisions about whether this guy could get treatment. If her failure to believe him wasn’t important, then why write so much about it?

Likewise, I suppose I wanted some conclusion from all this: not just a look at who is believed, but an argument about who should be, how people can fairly make decisions across class and cultural lines, when our programming is incompatible with justice. But instead this book seems to tear down all methods of knowing anything, and at the same time, without acknowledging that it’s done so.

First, Nayeri rightly takes aim—as many others have—at the idea that “you can just know” by talking to someone, that body language (especially with strangers, especially strangers met across some cultural or social gap) tells us anything meaningful about truth. People are wildly overconfident in their ability to tell who’s lying, and rarely do better than chance (and even then, not much better).

Next there’s common sense: if you don’t know whether to accept someone’s word, you might consider whether their story is plausible. The problem here is that our common sense is often built on our biases. Nayeri shows this through the story of a Sri Lankan torture victim seeking asylum in the U.K. The man shows up with burn scars consistent with branding on his arms and back, known to be something government forces did…. but, perhaps because of a system demanding asylum officers meet rejection quotas, and an internal culture of skepticism and made-up heuristics to root out “lies” (for instance, asking the same question repeatedly; this is meant to make sure answers are consistent, but suggests to subjects—particularly, y’know, torture victims—that their last answer was insufficient and should be improved), he wasn’t believed. Instead, the Home Office concluded that the most likely scenario was that the man had paid a doctor to anesthetize and brand him in hopes of forging an asylum claim even though he would be just fine in Sri Lanka. The agency felt this was such a common and likely thing, they even created an acronym for it, thus further bolstering its appearance of credibility. After years of legal battles the decision was overturned, but it took the U.K. Supreme Court to do it. One person’s common sense is another person’s nonsense.

That case, of course, relied on a doctor’s evaluation, and many of Nayeri’s examples pit lazy assumptions or biased heuristics against actual expertise—reasonably enough, one might think. But she raises doubts about expertise too: what is real expertise, and what is feigned or misguided? Her management consulting firm put new associates through an extensive program of improving their performance of expertise (dress expensively, speak with calm authority), none of which had anything to do with knowledge. And then there are the years of “fire science experts” who were actually just firefighters, repeating received wisdom—mostly about supposed indicia of accelerators, which led to survivors of home fires being convicted for the murders of their families based on, as it turns out, things that fires naturally do. Happily, fire science has improved with application of actual science, but there are still fake experts out there, as well as methods that are supported today but will be outdated or disproven in the future. So what are we left with, really?

That’s probably too big a question for Nayeri to answer definitively, but I wanted her to at least try. Or even acknowledge the enormity of the question, with some reflection on where we go from here. Instead the book just seems to poke a lot of holes in different areas and then end.

Finally, Nayeri’s insecurities seem to be on display a little much. She keeps reminding the reader of her sophisticated taste: she learned to dress from the best, she disdains melodrama in film. These are related to questions of who gets believed—your presentation and others’ perceptions of the “appropriate” level of emotion in a situation both play a role—but aren’t quite tied back to them. Likewise, there’s a whole scene of her getting upset that a British aristocrat can tell she is not an aristocrat, which, okay?

At any rate, I do think this book is worth a look, because implicit biases in determining credibility and making decisions are incredibly important. And readers are of course capable of drawing our own conclusions rather than needing them all provided by the author. But better organization, a stronger argument and the removal of extraneous material could have made it a must-read and as is, it isn’t.

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dina Nayeri's new book "Who Gets Believed" is a fantastic look at the experiences of refugees. She doesn't just talk about what they go through when they leave their homes, but also about things like religion, mental health, and how experts in society affect them. This makes the book really interesting because she shows how these big things can make refugees' lives even harder.

What's really good about the book is how Nayeri tells personal stories while also talking about bigger ideas. She does it in a way that makes it easy to understand, even though the subject can be complicated. This makes the book really important, especially now that we need to understand refugees more.

In the end, "Who Gets Believed" is a really powerful and interesting book. It talks about things that aren't always talked about and helps us understand what refugees go through. Anyone who wants to learn more about refugees and why it's important to care about them should read this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

[Katrisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so much more than a book about refugees and their stories, though Nayeri does shine a light on the injustices of the bureaucracy that asylum seekers are forced to navigate. This book is also about the cultural performances that we all engage in and the ways we construct beliefs that solidify our membership in a group and also exclude others. In addition to talking about refugees Nayeri explores religion, mental illness, suicide, "experts" and so much more. I feel like I have a better grasp on being human after reading this book. I am going to recommend this book to everybody!
Thanks Netgalley for letting me read this wonderful book!

[Crystal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Holy shit, this was the most sanist book I've read to completion in many years. Compassion is extended to the oppression and systemic lack of belief in the stories and pain of refugees, torture survivors, women (especially mothers) of color, pain medication seeking by people with sickle cell or cancer (the only illnesses seen as credible), people who are sent home by medical professionals and die as a result, the parents and family of the mentally ill, etc., etc. There is a dearth of compassion for the (severely) mentally ill and to a much lesser extent people with sick cell or cancer seeking pain medication. There is a lot of talk of performing your pain, illness, suicide attempts, etc. without a shred of insight into the fact that most mentally ill do perform but not what she imagines, not their illness, they sometimes perform being neurotypical in situations where they do not feel comfortable/safe or as it's commonly known, masking.

There is the hideous idea that tough love, work, and applying how mental illness is treated in her country of origin, the country she fled from, will turn her brother-in-law into a neurotypical person, a worthy member of society who doesn't 'perform' mental illness. She later says the reference to her home country meant multiple squats by ordered by a stern uncle which only further exposes her ignorance regarding mental illness. At one point she gets to the point she changes her brother-in-law's name in her husband's phone in hopes he won't pick up his brother's calls requesting support. She instantly changes it back, realizing she's going too far, but it shows her complete lack of empathy regarding her brother-in-law.

She realizes by the end, after her brother-in-law's tragic suicide, she should have believed bur there is still the undergirding idea it's all a performance. Even in the last chapter she tells the story of a woman with Munchausen's who kills herself after she is not believed without a reference to the fact that Munchausen's is itself an illness. This seems to tie into her pet theory that her severely mentally brother-in-law was acting his pain and killed himself when it was not believed. Even when she first hears of his suicide, she imagines that he's alive with a few tiny cuts on his wrist, another gesture which is not to be taken seriously.

This was honestly such a difficult book to read. I wasn't triggered in the colloquial or clinical sense of the word, just sighed at the fact that three master's degrees do not guarantee care for and insight into (severe) mental illness, that they do not guard against ignorance. I honestly expected better from an author I knew had deep compassion for refugees which was the entire reason I had read some of her previous books and decided to read this one.

P.S. Also, lose me with that bullshit idea about becoming 'free' via suicide. I know many neurotypical people and even some of those with mental health issues view the lives of the severely mentally ill like the brother-in-law (and me) as sad and pathetic but come on. The brother-in-law in the memoir made multiple attempts to go inpatient before his suicide and was denied by a shitty healthcare system, there was obviously a huge part of him that wanted to live.

[Philip · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Who Gets Believed" is a tricky book on a tricky topic.

On the one hand, Nayeri clearly illustrates the unfairness of not being believed and how damaging that can be, both for the individual and for society. She talks about asylum and immigration systems seemingly designed to find inconsistencies on which to base denials, about biases and reasons behind people not being taken seriously at hospitals, and about her own struggles with taking someone self-destructive seriously. These are powerful and important stories and perspectives, infuriating and unfair.

On the other hand, she doesn't even try to have a nuanced discussion about, really, anything. On the one topic she tries to do justice from more than one perspective (her own issues taking someone seriously), she comes up painfully short. This is a problem, a major one. How can she expect anyone to have an honest discussion about real issues when refusing to even acknowledge that there might be more ways to look at something than her way.

She rightly points out that we, humans, are absolute garbage at telling if someone is lying, especially if that someone is a stranger. She berates the system and experts who can tell for one reason or another if someone is lying (spoiler, pretty much everything and anything we're inundated with saying that this or that is a "tell" that someone is lying, it's pretty much humbug), it leads to honest people not being believed when they tell the truth. She then turns around and believes people, and cites other experts who can somehow tell that people are telling the truth. Which is it again?

Don't get me wrong, some of the cases she discusses can be verified with research, and making the effort to verify is something that should absolutely be a minimum requirement. It's also a great argument that the system should trust but verify instead of, as it often does today, reward distrust and semantic trickery as tools to achieve denial. However, it's disingenuous to argue trust without also acknowledging that the truth really is difficult to discern from a story, and a lot of refugee claims are by their very nature difficult to verify. At which point a story might be all that a decision is based on, and that's not an easy situation - even if it may appear as such in any individual case.

The "who" that gets believed is an important question, the "why" as well. It's also important to point out that while for some, the truth might indeed not be enough, for others it may not be a requirement in the first place. Simply put, even in an ideal system, representatives of that system would still be stuck deciding who to believe, some of whom will be telling the truth, some of whom will not.

The author doesn't really offer a solution to the issues and wrongs she mentions, I'm not sure she wants to. But then again, why else would she have included her own distrust - only to land in that she might still have been right after all - that's another question I'd like to have answered.

For me, the content of the book is a weak-ish three, the writing and over-philosophizing dragged it down to a two/two and a half. That said, I did order The Ungrateful Refugee, so I still think the book could be worth your time - especially if you think the current way of doing things is working just fine.

[Tanja Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is part memoir and part personal insight into who gets believed - in the courtroom, in the ER, in the immigration office. It's deeply personal and the stories told of other people's fates are shocking and horrifying. Truth in itself seems to be of little consequences, how it's said is often the essential point. The cultural differences and the differences that occur simply through passing time also play an important role.

[AM · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that slowly, but surely, won me over

[Leah M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to libro.fm for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook. I am offering my honest opinion voluntarily.

This sounded like an intriguing story, especially with the dramatic increase of people claiming asylum in recent years. It isn't something I know much about, but I figured this would be a good way to learn more about it.

Ayesha Antoine did a fantastic job of narrating this, and I'm sure it couldn't be an easy topic to narrate. Some of the material is exceptionally difficult to listen to, not only the descriptions of torture, but also how these people are treated when they're seeking asylum.

Nayeri approaches the material with an open mind, and a different mindset than most people since she has had the experience of seeking asylum as a refugee herself, as a young child. Fleeing Iran with her mother and brother because they were Christians in a country that persecuted Christians clearly left a big impact on the author, and it guided her towards working with others seeking refuge from authoritarian regimes and safety in western countries. However, the process isn't an easy one, and it really comes down to their stories being believed.

We're introduced early on to a man being held and tortured. We hear graphic details of his torture and subsequent escape, and his ongoing struggle to be accepted as a refugee in England. So many of the stories in England seemed outlandish, but these are people's lives and safety in danger, and it was heartbreaking to hear how easily their claims were tossed aside and dismissed.

However, the story was choppy and interspersed with other stories. While so many of the anecdotes were important, they weren't told in a linear fashion, and it was difficult to follow everything since it jumped around. We went from the Sri Lankan refugee to the way that people from different cultures demonstrate grief and distress to the author's own experiences both past and present, back to the Sri Lankan refugee, to how women, particularly women of color are treated in medical settings, and then back to the author's life during the pandemic. It was exhausting trying to follow everything, and I personally would have preferred each story being told in a single chapter. However, that wasn't how it was told, and it jumped back and forth in a way that wasn't connected in any way.

Overall, this book talked about so many important topics, and while I didn't love how it was laid out, I did like that it paid attention to the idea that we easily believe some stories, and readily dismiss others, even when they're true, and why that is.

[Ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Dreamscape Media through Net Galley who allowed me to listen to the audio version of this book.

This book is shocking, enraging, and excellent. In it, Nayeri, describes the almost impossible task that asylum seekers have in convincing immigration officers of the obvious truth. Nayeri shares numerous stories of asylum seekers who have been tortured and raped being told that they are lying and that their wounds are self-inflicted. They are forced to relive their trauma over and over again to suspicious officials. After all that, they are often rejected. Police interrogators in the U.S. use horrible interrogation techniques to pry false confessions from suspects, who are often minorities. Police are allowed to lie about almost everything. They wear down scared and confused people.

Dina Nayeri also tells the story of her own life. She was born in Iran and her mother converted to an evangelical, pentecostal form of Christianity. Dina’s mother, herself, and her younger brother became refugees and eventually gained access to the United States. Dina struggled to adapt to the United States, which was made harder because she is neurodivergent. Throughout her life she struggled with her belief and her desire to be believed.

This book is enlightening and convicting in many ways. I’m ashamed of the United States and European countries. We need to make our countries worthy of our lofty claims.

I listened to the audio version of this book. It was narrated excellently by Ayesha Antoine who has a wonderful British accent.

[Olivia Swindler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the overall premise of the book, but felt like Nayeri tried to cover too many topics. I found her personal antidotes to take away from her overall thesis and found her processing took away from the overall argument of the book.

Thank you to Libro.fm for my ALC!

[Naomi Diep · Rating 1 out of 5]

I truthfully could not tell you the plot line of this book

[Ninna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't just an examination of a particular topic, like asylum seekers reliability, but rather how bias effects believability in all different aspects of life. From healthcare issues to criminal law to relationships, Nayeri touches on all these topics weaving a personal narrative throughout which helps give the audience a connection to what could have been a book about statistics. She would toss in shorter anecdotes, like the consequences of an autistic man being interrogated by police, which could be an entire book on its own. Yet, arguably the most devastating story was about her brother-in-law which was written so raw and honestly that I won't soon forget it. There is a lot of important information to absorb in this book which will, hopefully, lead readers to some deep self-reflection. This is the first book I have read by this author but it will not be the last. Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

[Marie Sinha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Who Gets Believed is a bewildering romp through what seems like the author’s stream of consciousness. I could not make heads or tails of it. There were chapters on church tent revivals, refugees, a random interview with a college buddy who blamed nurses for mistakes in hospitals with zero facts or data to back that theory up. If that were not bewildering enough, paragraphs were randomly thrown in about her personal life and brother in law’s issues, with little compassion I might add.
It was so randomly thrown together, had to back up paragraphs to see if I had missed chapters. Did I mention it was boring?
So not a good read for me.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed listening to this book so much, even the difficult parts. A very interesting perspective that really makes you think about the title’s question in all aspects of life. Highly recommend.

[June · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was at its best when focusing on refugees seeking asylum. Some of the stories of torture were hard to read.
The author covered a lot and I think she would have done well to narrow her focus.
I found it hard to take that, in light of all her research about the trauma inflicted on suffering people who are not believed, she took such a tough, unsympathetic stance about her brother-in-law’s mental illness and consequential suicide. I can’t imagine the pain she must’ve caused her husband and his family with her insensitive comments.

[Crystal Palmisano-Dillard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lot of food for thought.

The author explores a variety of situations in which a person does or doesn’t believe what’s true, or at least true for someone.

Asylum seekers and the hoops they have to leap through are central to the theme, but there’s also mental illness, physical illness, religion, and more.

I’m not sure there’s an actual point beyond considering why you do or don’t believe someone and the value being believed can have for those doubted.

[Gigi Ropp · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a female immigrant, this book eloquently explained many of the situations I have faced and have seen my peers encounter. I’m grateful for voices that speak up for injustice and share stories to help enlighten others and this does exactly that!

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written, but full of errors and misunderstandings about immigration law, and displays a real lack of empathy about mental illness.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a weird book – it is an important reflection on what you’d expect, based on the title, but it also contains way more memoir than I would have thought necessary, even granted that the memoir aspects are necessary to a thorough exploration of the inconsistencies in Nayeri’s own thinking.

I really liked her analysis of the techniques of business jargon. Corporate spinners of tales spout metaphor after poorly-framed metaphor, leaving the listeners struggling to catch up and off-balance, unable to parse the truth or falsity of what is being conveyed. I have had more than one boss who speaks like that.

That was just a nugget inside of alluvial deposits of her of Iran-immigrant back story. (Chew on that metaphor now; I’m on to the next thing).

I did also love the bit about glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Hilarious depiction of the most silly and vacuous girls of her cohort going “sha-la-la-la-la” while chewing gum; meanwhile her own earnest entreaties to Jesus, to let her do it, go unanswered. Of course those “sha-la-la” girls (looking at you, Lindsey!) were faking it, or (to be generous) fooling themselves. But they were believable, in their particular social circle.

I also found particularly important her savaging of the blinkered cultural assumptions by immigration adjudicators, usually framed into fake-universal truths by comfortable Westerners who have never even been off their own continent, let alone been capable of having any idea what claimants face in their homeland. Just as a for-instance, she talks about how people from Iran, especially the old ones, live in a cultural milieu that is so alien as to create great gulfs of misunderstanding in the minds of ignorant interlocutors who simply do not know what they do not know. The normal Iranian technique of answering a question, for instance, apparently involves a great deal of time: gobbets of words to establish context and so on. The last thing they mean to do is be evasive, but the adjudicator is impatient and assesses them as “lying / un-credible”. And that is before we get into alien metaphors such as “watermelon slices under my arms”. The most sincere and trustworthy claimants get held to an utterly unreasonable and inhumane standard of evidence, as if one were commonly issued a government certificate certifying that one’s back full of scars resulted from torture. Introductions of new ways of saying it, as one would normally do in the face of a disbelieving interlocutor, are taken as evidence of a “changing story.” Meanwhile, a well-coached liar can stick religiously to their story and get believed.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" (Yeats)

[Vic Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

TW // suicide, ableism, mental illness, torture, racism

Okay soooooo would just like to say this was a SHIT SHOW related to ableism. The title asks who gets believed yet the author spends a HUGE chunk of the book disbelieving that a mentally ill man has a mental illness and just actively insisting he's faking it.

EXCUSE ME??? Also a large chunk of this book is about the disabled man and all the details of his mental illness WRITTEN WITHOUT (most likely) THE DISABLED MAN'S CONSENT because the man is DEAD. So you're making money off a disabled man's story and life???? Absolutely the fuck not.

This happens so often to disabled people - those who don't believe there disabled use their life to turn a profit.

Oh and then she deadass fakes hysteria (a mental illness of the past that used to be called female hysteria and was actually considered a mental illness that got so many women, especially BIPOC women, institutionalized) all to get a C-section???? The actual audacity.

And how autism is talked about like it's some horrific disgusting disease when it's literally a neurotype is EXHAUSTING. The author also might be autistic but still talks about it like it's the worst thing imaginable. The internalized ableism is so evident.

This book was literally written, edited, and likely had sensitivity readers and absolutely zero disabled people were included to catch any of this? Absolutely disgusting. Anti-ableist education for all involved is so needed because this was so bad.

This whole thing undermined her discussion of why asylum seekers and those wrongfully convicted don't get believed. Also the book would have been so much better had she just focused on that.

[Kaila · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 stars

This is honestly a phenomenal read. It has been over a week since I finished listening to the audiobook, and I still think about it daily. Dina Nayeri has an exceptionally engaging writing style, part memoir of her life and part sociology/psychology and reflection. This book addresses a lot of different scenarios, like refugee interviews, medical situations, organised religion and cultural performance. Although discussing a wide range of topics, the focus throughout the book is why the truth is not always enough, the power of words and assumptions, and believability in all aspects of life.

This book was incredibly reflective, though-provoking and at times completely heart-crushingly tragic. I was completely engaged with the author throughout the book, which is often hard for me with nonfiction books. I am definitely looking forward to reading more from this author, I think her perspective is incredibly introspective and important.

While the author does jump around between topics sometimes which may be disorienting to some, I loved the flow of stories between each other, it really did feel like a conversation with the author. I definitely recommend the audiobook for this very reason.

[Ann Herrold · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic of this book is incredibly important, but I'm not sure Nayeri achieves much of anything. Her discussion of what it is like to be a refugee and the broken asylum system was perhaps the only time she was on topic. Otherwise, her personal anecdotes make the book extremely hard to follow. I loved the writers she included (Sontag, Nietzsche, Kafka, etc.) but felt less like there was a point to including them and more like it was the authors stream of consciousness. In my opinion there should have been more inclusion about how survivors of rape (who are mostly women) are routinely disbelieved. Instead, the book focuses on things like mental health and reality and religion. Those things could have been interesting, but they had more to do with how people construct reality rather than who gets believed. The two overlap, but not in the way the author demonstrates. Overall this was an incredibly confusing book.

[Arzoo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dina Nayeri’s extensive research and portrayal of the innocence misjudged was extremely compelling to read - I found myself sucked into the harsh stories of the wrongly convicted and the frustrated innocents. I did find myself get a little confused and lost in the transitions from the case studies to Nayeri’s own life story and sometimes felt as though it was straying away from the main theme of the story. That being said, I did read this book in more spaced out chunks which ended up adding to the lack of cohesion. If I were to read this again, I would try to read the book as a whole in as few sittings as I can.

[Barb Purvis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly difficult to read due to the detailed account of horrific abuse to the victims in the book. I am no longer resilient enough to take in page after page of the worst descriptions. Skimming or skipping whole sections in order to grasp the takeaways.If only the author had stated the trauma and then the societal constructs to support her point …. BTW- the book did open my mind to seeing another side to the truth or a renewal of what part of the truth is the salient or kind action to take. 2 stars for readability; 5 stars for insight.

[Kristin Boggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

[ 4.5 stars ] I just love Nayeri's style of writing; I loved it in The Ungrateful Refugee, and I loved it here. So this review may be biased, as it's seen through that lens.

This book was more, and different, than I thought it would be. There are no ultimate prescriptions on what truth looks like, and how to be believed. Throughout the book, Nayeri weaves some important stories, both personal and otherwise, to highlight our human tendencies (fallacies?) in how and what we choose(?) to believe. No one is impervious to these blind spots; the best we can do is to remain aware and curious, cultivating as much compassion as we possibly can, and remember that the ability to see and believe truth should not be a weapon wielded by a powerful few. It's a responsibility of each one of us that identify as human.

[Rachel León]

A powerful book about the intersection of performance and belief. Who gets believed? Who decides what is true and what's a lie? This book dives into these questions and looks at the issue from asylum interviews, emergency rooms, courtrooms, and more.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like what this book was trying to say, but for me the memoir mix didn't work. It seemed like a lot of her personal stories barely connected to the main theme.

[Lisa Keuss · Rating 1 out of 5]

At first, the writing seemed decent enough, which tricked me into thinking that the book would be decent as well. Part memoir, part literary journalism; it eventually deteriorates into a giant word salad. And I could not mesh the memoir portion, which oozes privilege, with the concern for who will believe the asylum-seekers.