Once you’ve heard Lauren Hough’s voice, it’s hard to read her work without its dry, lightly accented rumble in your head. The bestselling author of Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing sacrificed a week of Diet Coke to read the audiobook for her second autobiographical release, Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America.
“You can’t drink anything but Throat Coat tea, which is revolting,” Hough warns anyone thinking about becoming a voice actor. You can have water too, she clarifies, but not cold. Her tone, in speech and writing, is witty and sure-footed, vulnerable and cogent, as it roves from one topic to another with the rugged dependability of a well-traveled gravel road.
When she set out on the dream road trip that plots the journey of Monster of a Land, well – “I didn’t know what the book was gonna be about, because it just started,” the author says. “The van could have died in Florida and that would have been a very different book.”
The van didn’t die, though. With her Husky mix Woody as wingman, Hough shares barstools with psychics, glimpses a different life via a Miami fling, and chats across the political divide while topping off her oil. Poverty, inequity, and prejudice appear in their many perilous forms as Hough ponders what it means to be queer, to be American, and to be on the road.
A mix of empathetic social critique and personal philosophy, the book takes up the travelogue-as-commentary mantle from John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, down to the canine companionship. It was Jack Kerouac, though, not Steinbeck, that bit Hough with the road trip writing bug at age 16.
“The book sounded like movements, and I didn’t know you could do that,” she says of Kerouac’s famed On the Road. In the back of her parents’ Ford Astro, Hough picked up a love for reading travel stories while between one place and another. Those stories eventually inspired the lengthy road trip at this book’s center, and they just might for you too. On highways and backroads, Hough’s own voice could be your soundtrack. One warning about that from the author, though: You never hear about the boring bathroom breaks or skipped roadside attractions in the written rendition.
“Your road trip’s always kind of lame compared to the book version,” she says.
Where They Read: Radio Coffee & Beer
“They have the misters,” says Hough. That they do.
What to Read Next
If Hough’s personal essay-style reporting whets your palate for something more sinister, she recommends Texas journalist Pamela Colloff’s debut book, Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast. Colloff tells the story of Paul Skalnik, a serial con man who traveled the United States committing various crimes. Pick up a copy on July 13 at Colloff’s release event at BookPeople.
One for the Road: Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America
by Lauren Hough
Pantheon
This article appears in June 26 • 2026.
