LM: I am also a devoted reader and paid subscriber to your Substack (worth every penny, I might add), and apart from the fact you’re just very good at your craft and have brilliant, hilarious, blisteringly acute insights into life, writing, class, identity etc. I may have a major publisher, but I hope I wrote a weird enough book that people are afraid to recommend it to their normie friends who definitely won't get it. I don't know that I have a choice in that. It's a moment of wait, other people know about her? Are we best friends? And she's still not from the radio. And to this day, I'm always a little surprised when I see someone else talking about her. It was like that with Patty Griffin in the 90s. I wouldn't know how I found them, how I first heard a song or what made me buy the CD or book. My favorite things-music or art or books always felt like my own little discovery. I've settled on, it's probably one of the better ways for people to feel about your book. ![]() ![]() LH: I never know what to think about this-how often people tell me they just sort of became aware of me and picked up the book. Do you get this a lot? People feeling like they’ve ‘discovered’ you? Or is it just me? And yes I know it was probably fed to me by an algorithm (without me knowing it) but the point is I bought it and read it and loved it and it felt a bit like an LP I found at the bottom of a pile in a used record store in 1986. I *like* that no one recommended your book to me at a dinner party. In a weird way your writing felt like a secret discovery for me and I think this ‘becoming aware’ thing was/is part of it. I just sort of became aware of you somehow. I was trying to think how I came across you and your work and the weird thing is I don’t actually know. So broke this week I panicked and applied to be the sex and relationships writer for Cosmopolitan UK and I didn’t even get a call back… the cheek! There’s a cost of living crisis and I’m broke. If you enjoy the interview - and obviously you will - please do me a solid and subscribe. And bless her, she clambered up! If this is the first you’ve heard of Lauren Hough, all I can say is YOU ARE WELCOME. Because I’m newly obsessed by her work, I asked her a series of in-depth, overly-intense, at times tangential questions figuring she’d either dismiss me out of hand, answer in monosyllables or maybe just maybe join me on the same weird overly-intense tangential plane. I’ve honestly never really done an interview quite like it. Listen to me now: You just have to read it.Īnd the same goes for my Q & A with her below. Plus she’s a die hard Dixie Chicks fan and in addition to her brilliant memoir, a hilarious (if agonised and ambivalent) Tweeter as well as the author of Bad Reads a compulsive and hilarious Substack that’s about, well, whatever weird random shit is on her mind. ![]() Also back in the 90s she was court-marshalled by the US military who accused her of fire-bombing her own car for the insurance money during the 'don’t-ask-don’t-tell’ era. Also the minor detail that she was raised in a religious abuse and sex cult, the Children of God, that trafficked Hough and countless other blameless child ‘members’ across the globe, robbing her of an education, a name, sense of self, yet somehow, inexplicably, leaving her immense writing talent in tact. She’s been an Air Force Airman, a green-aproned barista, a bouncer, a bartender, and, for a time, a cable guy.”įair enough, but that leaves out the not insignificant fact that she’s a six-foot-tall lesbian dog-owner who lives in Austin, Texas, has won a bunch of literary awards and can single-handedly (sort of) fix up a dodgy old van. She was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in seven countries, and Amarillo, Texas. Oooohkey, so here to start? According to the bio on her author site, “Lauren is a New York Times Best Selling author and essayist. She’s one of those rare writers whose background and work are difficult to describe without sounding like a deranged fabulist but allow me to try. Lauren Hough is flat out, but dull she is not. Because it reminds me that true originality is still alive and well in a world where so much of what’s out there often feels formulaic, derivative or just flat out dull. ![]() And when that happens, I stagger to my feet, heart-soaring and do a little drunken Irish jig down the road. AND YET every once in a while I stumble across a writer who truly refuses to be slotted, whose work, subject, style, voice, turn-of-phrase, punctuation, whatever - tickles me under the chin then right-hooks me sideways leaving me speechless in the gutter, concussed for days. “Defies categorisation” has become its own stupidly vague category of late, which renders the term a meaningless at best and at worst an inexcusable cliche.
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