David Archuleta with Sam Archuleta — Devout
American Idol alum David Archuleta discusses his memoir about leaving the Mormon church, coming out as queer, and rebuilding identity after a life lived almost entirely in public.
Why we picked this
Archuleta's particular situation — fame arrived before self-knowledge, in a religious context that made certain forms of self-knowledge impossible — makes Devout something more than a coming-out story.
David Archuleta became famous at sixteen, as the runner-up on American Idol Season 7. What followed was a career built partly on his Mormon faith — a faith that placed him, as he came to understand, in an impossible position regarding his own sexuality. Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself is the account of that reckoning: a Mormon mission, years of trying to pray away what couldn’t be prayed away, a public coming-out, and the work of figuring out who he is when the person he was told to be doesn’t fit.
In conversation with his brother Sam Archuleta — podcast host and audiobook narrator who has walked alongside much of this journey — the conversation will be intimate in ways that formal literary events rarely manage. The memoir is partly an account of family dynamics, and having family in the room shifts the register.
For audiences in Denver who caught the earlier Austin appearance, this is a different conversation with the same book.