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Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing: Essays
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About Leaving Isn't The Hardest Thing: Essays
Product Description A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A memoir in essays about so many things—growing up in an abusive cult, coming of age as a lesbian in the military, forced out by homophobia, living on the margins as a working class woman and what it’s like to grow into the person you are meant to be. Hough’s writing will break your heart." —Roxane Gay Searing and extremely personal essays, shot through with the darkest elements America can manifest, while discovering light and humor in unexpected corners. As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe--to Germany, Japan, Texas, Chile—but it wasn't until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond "The Family." Along the way, she's loaded up her car and started over, trading one life for the next. She's taken pilgrimages to the sights of her youth, been kept in solitary confinement, dated a lot of women, dabbled in drugs, and eventually found herself as what she always wanted to be: a writer. Here, as she sweeps through the underbelly of America—relying on friends, family, and strangers alike—she begins to excavate a new identity even as her past continues to trail her and color her world, relationships, and perceptions of self. At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave, and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one's past when carving out a future. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL Review “Stark and riveting . . . searingly honest and often painfully funny. . . . Hough’s conversational prose reads like the voice of a blues singer, taking breaks between songs to narrate her heartbreak in verse, cajoling her audience to laugh to keep from crying.” —Leah Mirakhor, The New York Times Book Review “Any appraisal of Lauren Hough that attempts to match the author’s own coruscating honesty in her debut memoir-in-essays can only conclude that she is the sort of hard-bitten hero who has no expletives left to give . . . [ Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing’s] sometimes shocking circumstances are related using a potent literary style that combines mordant humor and helpless indignation with ferocious intellect . . . [Hough’s] salvation was the discovery of an inimitable voice — her own, speaking truths about human society that are hard to hear but not, sadly, to believe.” —Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post “Revealing and honest . . . [Hough] tells it like it is, and it's heartbreaking . . . Hough's book isn't really a cult memoir — it's about so much more than that (and it's also quite funny, although you'll have to take my word on that because most of the funny bits include expletives I can't quote here) . . . [Hough] makes the ties between her own upbringing and the coltishness of American ideology explicit, but also opens up room for hope via small acts of resistance.” —Ilana Masad, NPR "Lauren Hough’s extraordinary essay collection Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing is as powerful as it is poignant. So many moments in this exceptionally crafted essays brought me to tears and before long I would find myself laughing as Hough wielded her razor sharp wit. This is a memoir in essays about so many things—growing up in an abusive cult, coming of age as a lesbian in the military, forced out by homophobia, living on the margins as a working class woman and what it’s like to grow into the person you are meant to be. Hough’s writing will break your heart. The ways she lays herself bare will leave you marveling at the strength it takes to reveal such delicate vulnerabilities. And when you come to the breathtaking end, you will kno
