The curtain is coming up on 19 Kids and Counting.
The reality show aired for seven seasons on TLC and was canceled after Josh Duggar admitted he had molested his siblings as a young teenager.
(This was before Josh Duggar was convicted on child pornography charges. The guy has serious problems.)
Back to Jinger, though:
In her latest book, People Pleaser: Breaking Free From the Burden of Imaginary Expectations, the former cast member delves into one specific way in which she was forced to fake various moments from her life for the camera.
“Early days, first meals together, making small talk, the process of getting to know someone can feel a little awkward,” she writes.
“But I would say that there’s probably not an adequate word for describing the unique kind of awkward it is to go through that whole process with cameras shoved in your faces and someone interrupting you when the conversation is just starting to flow.”
Jinger went on to reference filming with husband Jeremy Vuolo as “date-night-on-demand,” recalling how she was “instructed to repeat some of the same conversation and gestures” they’d made in a previous take.
To be clear, Duggar explains, these moments happened organically — but what viewers saw on each episode? Well…
“Fast-forward a few months, and I found myself walking down the staircase in my house toward Jeremy, anticipating that we might be about to make our relationship official,” she writes, adding how a producer jumped in to ruin this special reveal.
“I took each stair carefully, smiling at Jer, butterflies in my stomach, excited to hear what he would say to me when I got to the bottom of the stairs.
“Cut! Jinger, go back up the stairs please! We need to start over to get the shot. OK.”
Jinger and Jeremy have been married for eight years and seem legitimately happy.
They’re even expecting their third child.
But the journey to get to this place was clearly unusual, filled with input from outsiders and spontaneous exchanges that had to be recreated for television.
“He asked me to be his girlfriend, the sweetest moment,” she adds. “And then we got to do it all over again because there was a mic issue. And then we had to do some more takes. And then we had to do cutaways.”
Jinger made her small screen debut with her family in a 2004 documentary about their daily lives.
Four years later, 19 Kids and Counting premiered on TLC and aired until its 2015 cancellation.
A spinoff titled Counting On, which focused on Jinger and her sisters Jill and Jessa Duggar, kicked off later that year and was canceled in 2021.
According to Duggar, meeting Jeremy in 2015 was like a breath of fresh air, “but it was also kind of terrifying,” she says in the book, elaborating as follows:
“He was so handsome and so fun and so … alive. Because I was so steeped in [my religious] way of looking at things, I thought it was a potential step into sin to even acknowledge that I was attracted to Jeremy, that I felt my heart tugged in his direction…
“And once we fell in love, the vibrancy of Jeremy’s outlook, faith, and devotion began to crack open a wider world of mercy and grace to me.”
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