The Duggar Family Story You Never Knew

IN A REVEALING NEW MEMOIR THE FORMER REALITY STAR OPENS UP ABOUT CONFRONTING ABUSE AND FINALLY SEEING HER FAMOUS CLAN'S TRUE COLORS

- By DORY JACKSON

Even before the 2015 cancellation of TLC's 19 Kids and Counting and its 2015 spinoff Counting On, Amy Duggar King never felt seen. Both shows closely followed the lives of the ultraconservative Christian family in Arkansas led by Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. "I felt like an outsider," says Amy, 39, who was labeled "Crazy Cousin Amy" by her relatives on the shows because she led a more "worldly" life, free of the restrictive rules her cousins followed under their fundamentalist sect, the Institute in Basic Life Principles. "The divide has always been there, but it's more apparent now because I am speaking out," she says. In her new memoir Holy Disruptor, out Oct. 14, Amy writes about her difficult childhood, learning her grandfather was a sexual predator and confronting her cousin Josh about his crimes. "The entire book will drop jaws. No one knows the things that I was struggling with," she says.