Alison is having an awakening. After leaving her longtime boyfriend and moving across the country to work at a random UFO website, she expected to feel grief. Instead, she’s euphoric. She compulsively fantasizes about every phallic object in her eyeline: strangers on the sidewalk, her married boss Liam, the occasional letter opener. When she and her coworkers travel to Roswell, New Mexico for the annual UFO festival, she finds herself becoming obsessed with Derek, the son of an infamous abductee.
As Alison’s flirtation with Derek takes her deeper into the UFO community, her mental state unravels. She moonlights as an “experiencer” in a support group run by a New Age guru, and she’s surprised at how much sense the program begins to make. Newly porous and reeling from her past experiences, the lines between reality and the extraordinary become increasingly blurred.
Pitched as for readers of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley and Emma Cline’s The Guest, True Believer is a novel about aliens, yes, but also about desire, belief, and the stories we tell about who we are.
Art Credit: Angela Deane