Review by Booklist Review
Hough expands on her viral 2018 HuffPost essay, "I Was a Cable Guy. I Saw the Worst of America," in her book debut, an honest and thought-provoking memoir in essays. Joining the Air Force during the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" era, Hough hid that she was a lesbian. While it was frightening that she may be outed at any moment, Hough was an experienced liar. She told people a variety of stories about where she grew up, all partially true as her family moved extensively following The Children of God cult. She tells her officer that she is gay after receiving threats and having her car torched, and is honorably discharged but fumbles through life with a myriad of jobs and girlfriends. Hough's story is often painful, including homelessness and a brief stint in jail, and her time in the cult is horrifying, but her candid and direct writing makes for engrossing reading, and jolts of humor provide levity. Her story is not one readers often see, and it deserves a wide audience.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this candid debut, Hough traces her history of survival by "bending, twisting, and flattening" herself in environments hostile to her. Eleven entries recount her attempts at adaptability, first in Children of God (now known as the Family), the predatory cult in which she was raised, and later in joining the Air Force as a gay woman in the late 1990s. "Badlands" and "Speaking in Tongues" contrast ecstatic experiences of belonging both as a bar bouncer and while dancing on barroom floors with what she imagines her parents were seeking in the Family: "It felt like safety. Maybe it felt something like family, though I don't use that term." "Cell Block" presents a haunting chorus of female voices Hough hears from her cell after she is arrested for getting into a fight. The prose is often conversational and witty, as in "Boys on the Side," in which she compares finally sleeping with women to "suddenly getting to play in the World Cup when all you've done is play pickup soccer with the local divorced dads." At the work's heart is the therapeutic act of telling, and while some sections gesture toward cultural criticism, Hough is at her best when illuminating her circumstances. This moving account of resilience and hard-earned agency brims with a fresh originality. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Imagine changing your first name every time you moved. And you moved frequently. That's what Hough experienced growing up in a cult where she lived all over the world; when she finally left, she discovered she no longer had an identity. She knew she was a lesbian, though she didn't really know what that meant in practical terms; in the cult, it was something to be beaten out of her. She joined the U.S. Air Force under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," where she faced so much harassment that she eventually announced that she was a lesbian, in order to get a discharge. She spent years working in bars, working at cash jobs, and being one paycheck away from homelessness. Yet her essays don't inspire pity, as she doesn't feel sorry for herself. An essay about working as a cable company technician went viral online and details the depths to which humanity has sunk. She's funny, poignant, sweetly naïve, painfully honest, and brave. Hough and Cate Blanchett pair up to narrate the audiobook; Blanchett's reading is naturally more fluent, but it's personal for Hough, which comes through clearly. VERDICT Recommended for public library collections.--Jodi L. Israel, Orlando, FL
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of interconnected essays from a woman who has lived a wide variety of lives. In her debut, Austin-based writer Hough, "born in Germany and raised in seven countries and West Texas," probes an identity she once hid behind stories that made her "better at lying than…at telling the truth." As the daughter of parents who followed the Children of God cult around the world, Hough joined the Air Force as a teenager, in part to prove an Americanness she never felt strongly. She revealed little about her background to military colleagues and described her parents as "missionaries." The author did not especially like the Air Force, but the military and cult life seemed oddly similar. Like military members, the Children of God traveled all over the world and had to follow strict rules. Too often, Hough often found herself targeted for being different--"too loud, too quiet, too stubborn, too masculine"--and during her time in the Air Force, she received death threats for being gay. She eventually left the military and began to live as an openly gay woman in Washington, D.C., only to find she did not fit in with the "happy well adjusted" members of the LGBTQ+ community she met. Instead, Hough lived a hand-to-mouth existence that resembled her impoverished childhood. Yet the old need to fit in drove her to eventually live the American dream, and she "scraped and saved" enough to buy a suburban home and attempted to care about "football and video games." Only when she began to write and allow herself to be who she was did she realize she wanted no part of the "[cult of] normal" she had sought all her life. This thoughtful, occasionally meandering book explores the shaping power of the past and also raises provocative questions about what really constitutes a cult. An edgy and unapologetic memoir in essays. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
