Golden Child is an aching book about personal evolution and awakening, self-worth and boundaries, grief and longing, love and the dogged pursuit of truth. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. As someone who grew up in the 80’s heyday of conservative Christian evangelicalism, Lauren captures the incredible tension of being “good” in a subculture that demands self-abandonment and unquestioning obedience.  Spanning a wide range of gripping topics, relevant in every way to this present moment, Lauren doesn’t hold back, covering systemic racism, Trump, religion and politics, attachment trauma, mental health, dysfunctional family systems, toxic masculinity, religious deconstruction, estrangement, and so much more. Lauren’s story will serve as a heartfelt gift to all who are waking up, finding their former world crumbling.  The golden child has come into her power — embodied wholeness, rich compassion, and a personal sovereignty rooted in connection with our shared humanity — and invites us all to do the same.

Golden Child holds the sacred and the shattered side by side. Honest, beautifully written, and impossible to forget, it is the kind of memoir that lingers in your bones. It’s a book for every person who’s ever wondered if being “the good one” was slowly erasing them.

Golden Child is riveting. Lauren Smallcomb is an extraordinary storyteller who writes with raw honesty, vulnerability, and compassion. She captures the power dynamics of a family system that so many of us know in our bones: the child who is loved for compliance, the rejection that accompanies free thinking, and the spiritual messages that self-erasure is good and holy. Lauren's traumatic journey from ‘golden child’ through estrangement to embracing herself as a whole human felt achingly familiar to me and profoundly validating. Lauren honors complexity while modeling boundaries, self-reflection, and a discovery of one’s own voice. Readers who carry wounds from family systems or church culture will see themselves in her deeply personal accounts and will feel less alone.  Golden Child is not just a memoir. It is a lantern for anyone breaking generational cycles and healing their own trauma while seeking interpersonal, physical, and spiritual health for themselves and their children.

As a person who works with people holding all types of trauma, I appreciated this exploration of what it's like to carry the burden of the golden child, and then the painful unraveling of that role. More than a just personal story, it’s a resonant reflection for anyone who has faced toxic family dynamics and the cost of living true to their authentic self.

Golden Child is a courageous act of truth-telling. With raw honesty and tender strength, Lauren Smallcomb pulls back the curtain on the destructive power of patriarchal faith and family systems, and shows us what liberation, healing, and integrity can look like on the other side. This memoir is both personal testimony and prophetic witness—a gift for anyone who has been silenced, scapegoated, or shamed in the name of God. Lauren’s words carry the fierce hope of resurrection.

As a trauma therapist and someone who is also a "fallen" golden child, reading Lauren's words made me feel so seen and not alone. Lauren artfully shares the nuanced dynamics that play out in families as the golden child finds their own way and starts breaking generational cycles of self-neglect. Her brave and vulnerable prose will give you hope and courage to come home to yourself.