![]() ![]() Rumpus: Have you had any conversations with them where people have said, “Don’t do this”? I feel the weight of that, but mostly everyone is just excited about it. I think there’s a lot of pressure on any of us who publish to be the voice for everyone, and no one of us is ever going to be able to do that. I had a really hard time getting placed into some kind of spokesperson category for all this because my experience with it isn’t theirs, and their experience with it isn’t mine. Hough: There haven’t been many, but they’re pretty excited about it. What have the conversations with them been like about the release of your book? Rumpus: In the title essay, you mention reading Taylor Stevens’s first thriller and how you were weirded out by how she mentioned in her author biography that she was “raised in the Children of God.” You’ve also mentioned how you’re still in contact with some of the other kids who grew up in what’s now known as The Family. Just figuring out how to introduce everything was a bit of a challenge. But having to fit those details in so that it didn’t feel like a rambling Ayn Rand speech right at the beginning of the book? It took some work. So, I had to splice in those details later and let the reader stumble into those parts so they’d understand the rest of the book. Hough: I had to leave out basically my entire past for the version that appeared in The Wrath-Bearing Tree. Rumpus: Between the earlier version that appeared in The Wrath-Bearing Tree and the later version that appears in the collection, what were the major revisions? Or, maybe I’m lazy and thought that it would have been easier to turn in, that it wouldn’t have to be rewritten too much. If we started with “Solitaire,” part of it went chronologically, so we could just dip back and forth into that timeline. Lauren Hough: It seemed like a pretty easy place to open with all the material. What was the importance of having “Solitaire” open up the collection? I know that “Solitaire” was one of your first essays published, as a two-parter at The Wrath-Bearing Tree. The Rumpus: I’m always curious about the specific ordering of collections. We talked about writing about shitty jobs, the importance of country singers for essayists, and what website Hough believes is profoundly toxic. Whether she’s describing her explosive, heartbreaking exit from the Air Force in the days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or her time spent in a jail cell, memories from her time with the Children of God weave insidious threads through her work, and her readers will understand just how difficult it is to break free.Īlthough she calls Texas home, Hough has moved up to Massachusetts for a stint, and we were able to meet up recently on the beach for a proper (socially distanced, masked-up) sit-down. You might know her from any of these places, but you’re going to know her a lot better from her outstanding essay collection, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, published yesterday from Vintage. Or from her revealing essays in places like Gay Mag, Granta, and The Guardian, where she’s written about growing up in the cult formerly known as the “Children of God” (and which goes by just “The Family” these days). Or, from her TEDx talk on code switching as a butch lesbian. Or, from that viral essay on her decade working as a “cable guy” around DC. Each piece is a reckoning: of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one's past when carving out a future"- Provided by publisher.There’s a good chance you know Lauren Hough as your favorite rapscallion on Twitter. 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. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]() Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. "As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the U.S. ![]()
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