Lauren Hough: Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s Book Club podcast Sam's guest is Lauren Hough - author of an outstanding new collection of autobiographical essays called Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing which describe a life that took her from growing up in the Children Of God cult via being discharged from the US Air Force and jobs as a bouncer in a gay bar and a “cable guy” on the road to being a writer. She talks about not writing a misery memoir, what elites don’t know about working class life, “lesbian drama”, and the benefits of revising your work on magic mushrooms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast.
0:12.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week my guest is Lauren Huff,
0:17.9	the author of a new collection of essays called Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing.
0:23.7	Lauren, welcome.
0:25.5	Thank you so much.
0:26.7	These are very personal essays.
0:28.2	It's kind of a memoir in fragments.
0:31.8	What made you do it that way?
0:33.6	What made you kind of produce it as essays?
0:38.9	It just seemed like that my editor actually talked me into it. I sent out a proposal for a straight memoir.
0:47.4	And when we talked, it sounded like more fun. I could play around at the time or more. I could
0:53.9	gather anecdotes and stories to say what I wanted to say.
1:01.0	And it just gave me a lot more freedom.
1:04.0	And it's kind of... Well, there's so much in it that's sort of hair-raising.
1:09.0	And you've read the most extraordinary life. It begins with your car being set on fire.
1:15.8	Can you tell us how that...
1:17.6	How did we get to there?
1:20.5	How did we get to there?
1:22.1	I was serving the Air Force under Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
1:25.0	And one of the many problems with that law in the military
1:32.1	was that if you were being threatened, if you were being harassed, you couldn't say anything
1:37.8	because that would mean, you know, the question to why you were being harassed would be the answer you couldn't give
	...

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