Counting the Cost Book Review, Part 1

I read Jill Duggar’s memoir Counting The Cost in one sitting on the night of its release, feeling especially interested to hear from her after watching her interviews in Shiny Happy People, an IBLP– and Duggar-Centric docuseries that aired earlier this year. I’ve followed the lives of Jill’s family for many years, growing up in a community that desperately wanted to be just like the Duggars, and then as an adult, paying attention whenever their shit hit the fan. As a “TV Family”—as Jill called it—airing their lives on the screen meant inadvertently airing out their dirty laundry at the same time.

Since I left IBLP a decade ago, I’ve known that there were issues in the Duggar family, not just because we grew up in the same religious cult, but because of the extreme lifestyle they promoted on TV that was even too conservative for my family. And how was this family so buttoned up all the time? And wasn’t anybody concerned about the impact that having your entire life shown on TLC and being chased around by paparazzi and criticized on Duggar-Snarking sites would have on the kids?

I thought we might get the tea from Jinger when she published Becoming Free Indeed at the beginning of this year, but we came up empty. Jill’s memoir is different; she isn’t defensive, doesn’t sweep things under the rug in order to protect her family’s reputation, and she won’t look past issues for the sake of “God’s greater good.” She’s just honest, and her say-it-how-it-is approach to telling her story immediately drew me in.

Jill starts out her memoir with a story of a wintery afternoon during the time that she and Derick were courting. They are at the “Big House” that the Duggars built at the beginning of their show and still live in now, enjoying the snow slopes on the property. Jill and Derick are riding together on the same sled, behaving, Jill notes, like any twentysomething couple just weeks away from getting engaged would, when mother Michelle calls out, “Hey, no boys and girls on the same sled!” (Duggar 2).

Jill jumps off the sled and Derick looks around at Jill’s younger siblings, wondering who Michelle is talking to. But he sees no other boys and girls sledding together, and realizes that Michelle must be talking to him. Him, a man in a serious relationship with a woman who everybody knows he’s going to marry. His reaction is apologetic but bewildered, and while Jill brushes it off by saying that she should have known better, she tells us that’s about to change. “Soon, the bewilderment would be mine” (Duggar 3).

Chapter 1 launches right into childhood, discussing how Jill’s parents controlled their children’s access to music. She said that sometimes the music played was of a violin and piano, and other times a rousing chorus of voices. “On the rarest occasions we might hear drums, but only if they accompanied a marching band” (Duggar 5). If you grew up in IBLP you’d know of its staunch rejection of rock music and the use of any kind of drum, pointing to fringe studies done on rats and with plants showing that listening to drums made you dumber, and was probably demonic, so best just to stay away. I found it so interesting how Jill described her parents use of music as a means of control, as this wasn’t my own experience. I don’t know that my parents ever would have thought to use music as a “tool” like that. As an adult who always has a podcast, an audiobook, or music in the background to feed my ever-hungry ears, I can imagine how motivating it must have been to behave for the reward of music replacing life’s noise for a moment.

In the Duggar family dancing was prohibited, with exceptions only for little children who would “jump for joy” while still too young to understand that dancing brought attention to parts of your body that could be construed as provocative. If anyone danced, the music was shut off.

Jill tells us that she became “the best approval hunter in the whole family,” seeking nods of appreciation and words of praise for her good behavior with great effort (Duggar 8). As the second oldest daughter, she wanted to stand out as the most mature and good, and she took it to heart when her father, Jim-Bob would comment to other people that she was the daughter who was most like her mom.

She says that Jim-Bob was someone she’d looked up to her whole life, and one-on-one time with him was highly coveted; by the time she was nine years old, she had eleven siblings. I just cannot imagine what having so many children put Michelle’s poor uterus through! And gosh, how did she raise so many goddamn kids? The answer is: she had her daughters do it for her.

Jill was delighted when her parents introduced the Buddy System, which made Jill the sister-mom of several younger siblings. It became her permanent job to help her assigned siblings eat, dress, bathe, and buckle-up anytime they rode in their van. She says that she felt happy and honored that her mother entrusted her with her precious babies.

Then we are introduced to the Duggar Family’s standards of modesty. The Duggar girls wore homemade pantaloons under their dresses to keep them modest while they played as little children. The Duggar dress code for older girls is dresses and skirts, with nothing form-fitting or revealing involved. We are shown a picture of the Duggar family’s first trip to the beach, in their matching shirts and dresses with the pilgrim collars on the girls that Michelle surely must have made herself. They went to the quietest part of the beach and still had to avert their eyes to avoid seeing people wearing swimsuits. In an effort to teach the kids about modesty while also admonishing them not to judge others, Michelle admitted once, “When I was younger, before I was a Christian, I used to mow my lawn in a bikini. I really didn’t know any better” (Duggar 31). This story gave me some appreciation for that transparency; when the goal is to appear buttoned-up all of the time, for Michelle to be so vulnerable with her kids in this way is admirable.

“Nike!” is the family’s code word for “Look at the ground! There’s someone dressed immodestly around!” and uttering it will get an instant reaction from everyone in the family, eyes to their toes.

Jill writes that she was aware that her family was different from the rest of the world, and that attending Bill Gothard‘s annual homeschool conference when she was young was the first time she felt normal. The other families there were just like hers! She describes the conferences teachings, especially noting their adamant teachings that “children are a blessing from the Lord!”, that “Music can be a tool of the devil!”, and that “modesty is vital” to the morality and well-being of everyone around you (Duggar 23). She was struck by the Model Families in IBLP and felt like her family were chaos in comparison. Of course, in the years to come, the Duggars would become an IBLP Model Family too, as they were to my family.

Around the time that they joined IBLP, Jim-Bob was also getting into politics, and he successfully ran for state legislature in 1998. Because Jim-Bob spent months at the capital whenever legislature was in session, it was especially handy that Michelle homeschooled the kids so they could travel with him. Jill tells us of her brother Josh’s fascination with his dad’s work, dressing up in a suit and tie for each occasion he could visit Pops. When the other kids would go too, she writes that “We’d watchin him swagger beside Pops, a twelve-year-old politician in the making. …They called him the ‘Little Governor’” (Duggar 29).

For those who may not know, Josh Duggar molested some of his sisters—including Jill—when she and her sisters were young, a traumatic event for each girl involved that heavily impacted the family. They never intended for the incident to become public knowledge, but its emergence years later was a painful event that marked the beginning of Josh’s public demise.

Of the many problematic lessons and rules the kids were subject to, one that caused a lot of problems was the warning to not “stir up contention among the brethren,” which Jill wrote about saying, “It was a way for our parents to keep us siblings from talking badly about each other, or putting anyone down, but over time it became something else—something more sinister. By preventing us from discussing anything controversial or sensitive with each other, the instruction not to ‘stir up contention among the brethren’ became a tool for silence, for control, for guilt.” This is like your boss asking you and all of your coworkers to never discuss your salary with one another, claiming it’s to avoid conflict, when in reality, keeping everyone in the dark about how much everyone else is paid helps your boss keep your salary lower. Except, despite 19 Kids and Counting quickly rising in popularity, Jim-Bob wasn’t paying any of his kids to be on the show. Oh wait! We’re not even there yet.

Jill tells us in chapter 2 that her family has always been involved in her father’s endeavors, whether it was building their house or helping dad’s campaign for state representative. He ran against the incumbent for the republican nomination to the US senate, and told his kids, “I really feel like God wants me to do this. I’ve prayed about it and have done something that I only do for the most important decisions ever” (Duggar 36).

“What, Pops?”

“I flipped a coin three times,” he said, “and all three times it landed on heads. So I said, ‘Okay, God, you want me to run, so I will run” (Duggar 37).

First of all, I think that basing a decision on a coin flip is suspiciously woo-woo coming from someone with such a conservative stick up his ass; this really showcases how Christians just do whatever they want and give it a Christian label so that it fits their narrative. Second of all, deciding that a coin landing on a certain side is the medium through which God will participate in answering your specific question is an extremely self-centered way to put your all-powerful God in a box and make him do what you want. It’s…probably not how that works. For the Duggar kids’ takeaway from that lesson from Pops to be that he does things like run for senate at the whim of a coin flip and call it spiritual is just…disappointing. Even a little concerning?

Anyway, Jim-Bob considered his participation in politics to be his ministry, and when you’re a Model Family in IBLP, your dad’s ministry is the whole family’s ministry. This is because the power-structure in IBLP teaching is that dad is the head of the household who submits solely to God, while his entire family submits to him. When you really believe that about yourself and your family believes that too, everybody has the potential to get into a lot of trouble.

Jim-Bob lost the senate race, and Jill describes herself and several siblings feeling relieved to not move to DC for the duration of his term. But shortly after this, Jim-Bob proposed another family ministry to his kids, which he described as “a window of opportunity” that was surely the orchestration of God. This opportunity came with cameras, a film crew, and money. Jill wrote, “‘a window of opportunity’ became part of our family shorthand. It was an instant explanation of the reasons why certain choices were made, a reminder of the blessings received and the sacrifices that all of us must make in return. But with every passing season and every change that would follow, the meaning of those five words would alter. In time, whenever I would hear anyone talk about how that first decision to bring the TV cameras into our home was a window of opportunity, all I would think about was secrets and lies” (Duggar 39).

But “it wasn’t all bad,” she continues (Duggar 40). It turns out that whatever the Duggars did while a camera was rolling was paid for by TLC, and this meant that grocery shopping for their family of 14 would for once not fill the week ahead with “tater tot casserole or bean sandwiches” (Duggar 40). Yikes. Okay, so then the kids learn from a young age, “We love filming our lives, because now we can actually afford food.” A+ parenting JB! Good thing you now can afford to keep knocking your wife up!

And he did. They aired their growing family on TLC, filming through the pregnancies and births of half a dozen subsequent kids, bringing in enough money from the show to build a bigger house, since their two bedroom three bathroom home just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Jill says Jim-Bob worked out some kind of agreement with the show to have a significant portion of their new house paid for, and like every endeavor of Jim-Bob’s, his kids became his building crew.

As the show grew, so did the number of opportunities given to them. The Duggar’s became more publicly associated with IBLP and hosted Bill Gothard and some staff from his training center over for lunch, where Jill met Bill for the first time in person. Jill explains that Bill’s preference for pretty blonde girls was so well-known amongst those who knew him that his type was famously called “Gothard Girls,” and Jill admitted to joking around with her sisters that Jana—the only blonde of the older Duggar sisters—was a Gothard Girl. Somehow, “it didn’t occur to me at all how strange, unsafe, and unwise it was. And if I had, I doubt I would have been able to speak out against it” (Duggar 50).

Then Jill tells drops the bomb: the Department of Homeland Security was investigating her family. Imagine this: Josh was courting a girl, he confessed his sexual abuse of his sisters to her, and after ending their courtship, she wrote a letter to him expressing her anger, and instead of sending it to him, she put it in a book. “Four years later,” Jill writes, “the book was loaned to a friend at church and the letter resurfaced. It was read by someone who attended the same church as us. Instead of talking with Mom or Pops, she got more information from church leadership, phoned a hotline, and informed HSP about what she thought was potentially an abusive situation” (Duggar 52).

“Pops received a call notifying him of the investigation, and myself, most of my sisters, and my parents all had to be interviewed. We attended a closed-court session. People—strangers—would come to our house at random times to make sure there were locks on the doors and that everybody was sleeping where they were supposed to be sleeping. It was terrifying” (Duggar 52).

This situation was immensely anxiety-inducing for Jill, as she feared that saying one wrong thing could cause the government to take her and her siblings away from her parents. In the end, the story of what Josh had done rippled throughout their church and created sides, later causing it to split.

“When it was over, all I wanted to do was put it behind me. I had been terrified of losing my family and traumatized by the questions I had been forced to answer. I wanted to forget all about it. I wanted to move on front the whole thing—as fast and far away as possible” (Duggar 54).

To Be Continued

Duggar, Jill, et al. Counting the Cost. Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Shuster, 2023.