Review: "Counting the Cost" by Jill Duggar

Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar
Published September 2023 via Gallery Books
★★★

Much of Jill Duggar's childhood was chronicled for television. The fourth child and second daughter of the (infamous?) Duggar family, her family got bigger and bigger—and with it the media attention grew too. A television special, another television special, a reality TV show...

And then the scandals started, and Jill* started to see that not everything she'd been taught was true, and the incredibly sheltered way in which she'd been raised did not always offer the level of protection that she'd been promised.

Now, I've never watched 19 Kids and Counting or any of the other shows and specials—I've didn't grow up with TV and I can't stomach the thought of sitting through those shows now—but I've long found the overall story fascinating for being so wildly different from the way I grew up and the way I live now. It doesn't take much time on the Internet to make it clear that the rosy portrait that the family has tried to portray is not all that it seems, but the family has historically, for the most part, presented a united front. Even when Jill's sister Jinger wrote her second memoir—a treatise on why what she believed as a child is wrong and why what she believes now is right—she was very careful to say only positive things about her parents.

But with 19 kids in the family, plus assorted spouses and next-gen folks and relatives and hangers-on...the odds have always been pretty good that someone would break rank. And when Jill appeared in the Amazon docu-series Shiny Happy People (which covers the abuses and other problems of the religious homeschooling organization in which she was raised), and then announced this memoir, it became clear that that person was going to be Jill.

This is not a tell-all, per se: Jill is very careful not to tell her siblings' stories, and she is also very careful not to lump her parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, together. But it does paint a damning portrait of Jim Bob, who—as Jill describes it—maintained a manipulative, at times verbally and emotionally abusive level of control over the family, especially (but not only) when it came to money. And she brings receipts: most staggering, perhaps, the long letter detailing from Jim Bob detailing the money that had come out of his bank account to cover things for Jill—to justify why she'd never received any of the money he had told the IRS that she had. (That's called tax fraud, by the way. Unclear if Jill is aware of that, although I'm quite sure that her husband, who helped ghostwrite and previously worked as an accountant, is.) Or, when Jill finally got her hands on some numbers and realized that when she gave birth, the resulting specials had put some $100,000 in her father's pocket—none of which she'd seen, and none of which her father wanted to part with to cover the hospital costs.


And things that might seem small, or innocuous, but point to a greater habit of hypocrisy: rules being loosened for the sake of more entertaining television; viewers seeing the family shopping for groceries only when the film crew was around and TLC was paying for the nicer food, not when the family was living on bean sandwiches; timelines being bent for the sake of TV; the family and the IBLP preaching and preaching and preaching about the "umbrella of protection", in which Jesus protects men, who protect their wives and children, and then instead Jim Bob protecting his son, and only his son, at the expense of his daughters.

Jill's views will probably never really align with mine, but it's clear that she's come a long, long way from the approval-hunting girl she describes at the beginning of the book. (If you know anything about the fundie world, this will speak volumes: she grew up with the KJV as the only valid translation of the Bible; her current church uses a different translation.)

As to the writing: It's a little rough in places; the publication date was pushed up following the wild success of Shiny Happy People, and the editing was definitely rushed. Jill and her husband did work with an experience ghostwriter, though, which makes a world of difference. It's definitely better read if you're already familiar with the basics of the family story, or willing to not quite follow everything in parts of the book, but if you are familiar with the story...it's a pretty explosive read.

*Normally I'd use last names for authors, but for the sake of clarity I'm going with first names here.