Book Review: Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

This collection of essays by Lauren Hough doesn’t pull any punches. It doesn’t try to teach a lesson or force a happy ending. It just is what it is. The story of a complicated life. Growing up in an abusive sex cult that left her completely rootless with no sense of home. Trying to find her people in the military, but being disrespected and shut out. She similarly struggled to find her place in the D.C. gay community and as a cable technician. It’s impossible not to root for her as she works to create an authentic life.

Hough is a masterful storyteller and engaging writer.

I received this Advanced Reader Copy of Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Description:

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.