Growing up as a Duggar daughter, Jill Duggar Dillard knew one thing for certain: She never wanted to disobey her parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Going against her father meant exposing herself to the evils of the world, and as a young girl—one who admits she was eager to please—Jill wanted to keep the peace.
It took the 32-year-old longer to realize that evil was already breeding inside her family’s Tontitown, Arkansas home. And it looked a lot like her brother Josh Duggar.
“Home was small, but it was a place of safety,” Jill writes in her memoir, Counting the Cost, out September 12. “The lands beyond it were vast and unknowable, beset with hidden dangers that lurked like quicksand.”
In the book, cowritten with her husband Derick Dillard, the former star of two TLC reality shows about her large family candidly explains what it was really like to grow up in the spotlight—and under her parents’ interpretation of the fundamentalist Christian movement called Institute in Basic Life Principles or IBLP. Though they know speaking their truth could come at the cost of family relationships, earlier this year, Jill also appeared in Prime Video’s explosive IBLP-focused docuseries Shiny Happy People, alongside her cousin Amy Duggar King.
“People always have opinions about my life, and their own version of the story from what they believe my reality was growing up on reality TV,” Jill tells Vanity Fair. “I really felt like I wanted to do this to help other people for the long haul… to hopefully (help them) find their voice and know that they are not alone, that they don’t have to live in isolation and fear and control.”
Jill, the fourth born of 19 children, reveals in her memoir that she learned to be an “approval hunter” from a young age. She says her parents capitalized on her agreeable demeanor, affectionately calling her “Sweet Jilly Muffin.” “I wanted to be the good girl. I tried to be the perfect daughter,” Jill writes. Her efforts earned her top praise from her dad, whom she calls Pops throughout the book. She recalls Jim Bob saying that of all his children, Jill was the most like his wife, Michelle. “Being compared to my mom like that was the greatest prize I could ever wish for,” Jill writes.
The 266-page memoir details a seemingly idyllic childhood that began to fracture as her parents' roots within the IBLP community grew deeper, and family rules (which Jim Bob and Michelle called standards, convictions, or guidelines) grew tighter.
Jill recalls the family taking road trips to attend IBLP conventions, where leader Bill Gothard—who resigned from the organization in 2014 after multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment—would preach about the evil nature of music, the importance of modesty, and the vital role of reproduction for familial happiness. (Gothard has denied all the allegations, despite more than 30 women coming forward. An additional 10 women brought a lawsuit against him in 2016 for sexual harassment and abuse and accused IBLP church leaders of intentionally covering up his behavior. The case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations.) Yet as Jill noticed at a young age, Gothard himself was single and childless. “The usual rules didn’t seem to apply to him,” she writes of Gothard.
With each convention they attended, her parents’ grip on their children tightened, Jill writes. They began giving their children stricter dress code parameters and introducing obedience habits, forcing the kids to reply “Yes ma’am/sir, I’d be happy to!” when asked to do something.
When reality television came knocking, Jill says her dad, ever the salesman, pitched the show to the family as a way to disseminate the IBLP gospel to the masses. A single Discovery special in 2004—14 Children and Pregnant Again—begat TLC’s infamous reality series 19 Kids and Counting, which aired for 15 seasons. It was followed by Counting On, which ran from 2015 until 2021.
Filming came with perks: While the shows were in production, the Duggars could shop at the grocery store without a budget. Jill could also use a family debit card to stop for meals after driving her siblings to appointments or music lessons. (The family employed a “buddy system,” which effectively required older children to care for the younger children.) “It was a whole lot better than how it used to be, with us driving around with a Crock-Pot full of chili, feeding the little ones on the run,” she writes.
