Book Reviews and Sex Cults
Lauren Hough was born into and grew up in the Children of God, a sex cult known to members as “the Family.” Hough’s abusive upbringing was my primary reason for wanting to read Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing: Essays. The Family had a strange End Times twist on Christianity where adults not only share their bodies with one another (as chosen and scheduled by their leader), but touch children in a sexual manner and encourage children to do so to one another. Hough details a lot of boys humping her legs when she was young, behavior that was routinely encouraged. A girl who complained would be punished for not being right with the Spirit of God.
There were many other abusive aspects of the Family: physical violence, emotional and mental torment. Children were made to beg and to sell religious pamphlets and posters to passersby. A longer piece of Family literature approved for the teens is entitled Heaven’s Girl. Hough describes it as a “sort of YA novel about a teen girl who fights the Antichrist and enjoys being gang-raped by soldiers—how else would you tell them about Jesus?”
Over the past ten years, I’ve read a lot of both fiction and nonfiction about people stuck in cults. I’ve been writing a YA novel whose protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl trying to escape a polygamist cult. I wondered if Leaving could be a comp title for me. (Answer: only obliquely, less so than God Spare the Girls, which I mentioned in this blog recently.)
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A Profound Memoir in Essays
Leaving is also a memoir in essays, and that’s another reason I wanted to read it. Over the past four years and intensifying during the pandemic, I’ve lost a lot of family members. I ended up writing a lot of essays as a way to cope. Mostly they are braided works, weaving in elements of my early life, of my parents’ relationship, and of the political and cultural milieu in which all this grief takes place. So, I wanted to see how Hough had pulled the elements of her life together in essays—and how these essays worked together in a book.
I read the essays this week and found this to be a five-star book. Throughout each essay, Hough shows how her upbringing affects her decision making, often to her detriment. But there is much more here. The book jacket copy says the essays “interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning:of survival, identity, and reclaiming one’s past and future alike.” Generally, I agree with this. Good, good stuff.
Book Reviews and Cancel Culture
After finishing the book, I was really surprised to find a kerfuffle had been going on at GoodReads over Hough’s response to a review a reader posted on publication day. The reviewer had given Leaving a 4-star review and commented that it was a 4.5-star book. Hough responded by demeaning the reviewer (‘no one likes you’ sort of thing). It’s never a good idea for an author to respond to reviews, but this seemed odd, to lash out at a good review.
You can probably guess the rest. GoodReads book reviewers collectively lost their shit. How dare an author make any comment about their genuine response to a work? Hough joked that she had been high while making her comments. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t help.
What followed was a barrage of 1-star reviews by people who hadn’t read the book. This pile-on seemed ironically cultish. At some point, the GoodReads administration took these reviews down for violating GoodReads policy. That is, a reviewer should read the book they review. The review should be about the book itself and not about whether the reviewer hates the author personally. Nevertheless, the damage was done. Some of these reviewers reposted with words like “I read the WHOLE book and I hated it!” There are no details about the book, of course, because they actually didn’t read it. As I’m writing, the overall rating is 2.89 for a book that should easily be a 4. Anyone seeing this rating without knowing the backstory will probably give the book a pass.
Anger, Hurt Feelings, and Letting It Go
Hough never should have talked shit to a reviewer on social media, much less one who left a very positive review. But as I’d read the book about her trauma before learning about this whole mess, I did feel for her. The Family is the worst of it, but she was also harassed and threatened in the military during the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ era. Her car was set on fire because she’s a lesbian. She landed in jail on false charges. Her essay “Cable Guy,” a rendering of her job as a cable installer, is hair-raising.
I didn’t review Leaving yet, but I gave it the 5-star rating I had originally intended to. Perhaps my review will just be a few of the above paragraphs. And while Hough was out of line in her response, my focus is on the book itself, one that does much to explain cult membership—how and why it continues to be a choice in the United States, where one would image people would walk away:
“It’s not all that complicated. A cult needs control to function; people are easier to control when they’re isolated. Remove natural allies—parents, siblings, friends. Make people distrust authority. Convince the kids if they say anything, their parents will go to jail. You speak a different language. Never mind that you’re in a foreign country. Even if you speak the language, you don’t. You use the cult language now.
“An entire war is being waged to make you fearful and avoidant of anyone or anything that causes doubt—‘Come out from among them and be separate.’ It’s why evangelicals avoid secular books and movies and TV. You don’t have to be in a cult. There’s an entire society built to insulate those with faith—bookstores and music and movies, everything.” (From the essay “Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing” in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Part, p. 208)
I would have taken down my positive review if Hough had demeaned me for writing it. I would have been sad after taking the time to support her as an author. And, to be honest, I would have never purchased or read anything else she later wrote. Yet, with Hough’s strange and awful upbringing in mind, I wouldn’t have replaced my review with 1-star. Because that would be a lie about the worth of Leaving. And she’s already dealt with enough dishonesty.
More Chat about Books on Cults and Religion
Note: I reviewed some of the cult books I’ve read. Two books on polygamy that are very good are by FLDS escapees Carolyn Jessop and Elissa Wall. You can read my review here. God Spare the Girls is about megachurch evangelism, but is a great read about how power-hungry men twist spirituality to exert control over others.
Next up: “My Own Philosophy of Book Reviewing” or “Why I Like So Many Books.”