Susan Huckle grew up believing the world could end at any moment, and that this was a comfort. She was homeschooled on Bible prophecy in a Pentecostal church on California's Central Coast, drilled on the signs of the Rapture, and taught to keep a bag packed for Jesus's return. Preparing for the end of the world meant she didn't have to think too hard about why God still hadn't healed her father, who was paralyzed by a stroke.
What she never prepared for was her mother becoming a flat earther.
Huckle, now an actor in Los Angeles, will bring that story to Las Vegas on October 18, 2026, signing copies of her debut memoir, The Earth Is Flat?! And Other Things My Mother Taught Me: How a Childhood in the Evangelical Church Became an Adulthood in Conspiracy Theories, at the Barnes & Noble on North Rainbow Boulevard. The signing runs from noon to 4 p.m. and is free.
The book's subtitle is a fair summary of its arc. Huckle left her small town for Los Angeles to chase acting work, and as she built a life outside the church, the questions she had never let herself ask began catching up with her. Meanwhile, back home, her mother was falling down a YouTube rabbit hole: 9/11 truthers, mass shooting hoaxes, a flashlight app that was somehow spying on her. Then came the announcement that she was a flat earther.
The result is what Huckle calls a "MOMoir" — a portmanteau of memoir and mom that captures the book's central tension. It is, by its own description, both laugh-out-loud and vulnerable, and its organizing question is deceptively simple: if Mom was wrong about the shape of the planet, what else was she wrong about? Huckle isn't just losing her grip on the beliefs she was raised with. She's losing the person who raised her. The book asks whether a family can survive when its members no longer agree on what's real.
Huckle's résumé is an unusual one for a memoirist. She grew up in Santa Maria, California, and earned a B.A. in Journalism and Dramatic Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master of Sustainable Tourism from Arizona State University.
The Las Vegas stop is part of a national tour for the book. For readers who have followed the recent wave of memoirs about leaving high-control religious communities, Huckle's angle is a distinctive one: not a clean break from faith, but a slow, painful divergence between two people who love each other and no longer share a universe. The flat-earth reveal is the hook, but the grief underneath it — a daughter watching her mother disappear into a different version of reality — is the reason the book has resonated.
The event is free and open to the public. Attendees can meet Huckle and ask about the book.