Gurney ProductionsAl and Lisa Robertson are cleaning out the skeletons in their closet.
Duck Dynasty's beardless brother and his wife have opened up about their troubled pasts—both apart and as a couple—in their new memoir, A New Season: A Robertson Family Love Story of Brokenness and Redemption.
The Robertson family has made headlines for their particular brand of conservative family values, but Lisa and Al, who is the eldest son of family patriarch Phil Robertson, reveal that they took a long and winding road to arrive at peace.
In an advance draft copy of the book obtained by E! News, Lisa—who was in sixth grade when she first laid eyes on eighth-grader Al—writes that she attributes her deep infatuation for a boy at such a young age to molestation she suffered as a child at the hands of a male relative, abuse she says started when she was 7 and continued until she was 14.
"It was the 'why' behind my 'what,'" Lisa wrote. "In other words, it was the driving force behind behavior some people might have considered inappropriate...Consciously I think I felt I was supposed to have a 'man' in my life to please."
She and Al did not become a couple, and Lisa says that broke her heart and she started acting out wildly.
Lisa started dating one boy in particularly, a guy "old enough to buy alcohol and drugs, and at the time, I viewed that as a plus." Then, she wrote, she found out she was pregnant a few weeks before her 17th birthday and, while the boyfriend was excited, she immediately decided to have an abortion—a choice she couldn't forgive herself for for years.
"I have spent time with many young women who have been molested, had abortions and been through other types of trauma and shame," Lisa wrote. "Lots of them tell me they simply cannot get over what hapened to them...I often ask people who struggle to forgive themselves, 'If Jesus can forgive you, why can't you forgive yourself?'"
Al also writes about living "a double life" as a young man, having an affair with a woman who was still married, popping speed to stay awake on the job and drinking heavily. After a violent confrontation with his girlfriend's husband, Al wrotes, he returned home to his family and started to see the error of his ways.
Lisa and Al obviously later reconnected and had two children together—but they also reveal in their book that Lisa had a 14-month affair back in the 1990s that almost destroyed their marriage.
Al writes that he started suspecting in 1999 that Lisa was seeing someone and then he got hard evidence in the form of cell phone records.
"It was really hard," Al told Us Weekly in a recent interview, discussing their book and the aftermath of Lisa's affair. "It was one of the most difficult things our family has ever gone through...What I will say is that once I made the decision that I was in a place where I could forgive Lisa and I wanted our marriage to work, [his family] got on board behind me. It took a little while for each of them in their individual way to work through their issues with Lisa, but they did. And now we're very close and they're very close to her."
In the book, Lisa also connects her infidelity to her childhood abuse, writing, "As we have spoken with other couples whose marriages have suffered an affair, we have learned that a sinister bond exists between abuse and infidelity."
Duck Dynasty airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. on A&E. A New Season is on sale now.