Lauren Hough Loses Lambda Prize Nomination After a Twitter Feud
nytimes.comLast month, Lauren Hough, a first-time author, received good news from an editor at her publishing house: Her essay collection “Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing,” published last year, was set to be nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the category of lesbian memoir.
The nomination seemed a capstone to a remarkable debut, which won critical acclaim and spent two weeks on The New York Times’s best-seller list.
The book, described by its publisher as interrogating “our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely,” drew heavily on Hough’s life experiences, including as a lesbian in the Air Force during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era.
A reviewer for NPR likened her skill at portraiture to that of “one of those cartoonists who can sketch out four lines and suddenly you see your face in them.” But Hough said in an interview Monday that an editor had recently informed her that the nomination had been pulled, following a social media dust-up in which Hough had defended, at times heatedly, a forthcoming novel by the author Sandra Newman, a friend of hers, from criticism that it was transphobic.
