When Lauren Hough was 37, she sold her house, all the stuff in it, bought a Winnebago, and left Maryland, heading west with an iPod full of John Denver. Her debut essay collection, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, is about finding the strength to pack your bags and give the finger to the places and people who tried their damnedest to diminish you. Driving away isn’t hard but, as Hough can attest, rebuilding your life is—especially when past traumas rise out of memory’s dirt like the undead.
In terms of a place to call home, Hough belongs everywhere and nowhere. Raised in a cult called the Children of God, later shortened to the Family, she grew up a cross-continental tumbleweed. Born in Berlin in 1977, her family followed the whims of the cult’s founder, David Berg, as he moved to Chile, Argentina, Japan, and Switzerland. With a grandmother in West Texas, she bounced in and out of Amarillo. Her parents divorced, left the cult, returned, then left again. “A cult,” Hough writes, “is your textbook abusive relationship—love-bomb, isolate, create dependence, and your victim won’t have the power to leave.”
Hough slept in rooms crowded with kids and learned how to hold a baby in one arm while changing the diaper of another. When cult elders—called shepherds—noticed that she wasn’t “feminine” enough, they had her reread The Look of Love, a text that taught girls how to properly flirt with men. When she didn’t cross her ankles correctly, her stepfather, Gabe beat her. She took revenge by switching the bed-sharing schedule, so he’d be assigned to sleep with “women he loathed.”
