Untamed is a memoir. It’s also a call to arms. And a self-help book. Mostly, though, it’s the story of a woman blowing up her life to build a better one, and her interrogation of why she had a life that required blowing up in order to find happiness.
Glennon Doyle has written a couple of other books, and also had a wildly successful TED talk which is all about courage and vulnerability and the armor that we put around ourselves to protect us from the world. In Untamed, Doyle focuses on her initial meeting with Abby Wambach and subsequent relationship, all of which began as Doyle was promoting her previous memoir…which happened to be about saving her marriage to her husband. Oof. This is a book about a woman who has made a career out of confronting her difficult truths, and then discovering that there was one more big truth to confront and dealing with the fallout. I think it’s also worth noting that the book is dedicated to Doyle’s older daughter, Tish. Sometimes, seeing our choices reflected in someone we love is enough to give us the strength to make different choices when doing it for ourselves is not enough.
This is a deeply personal book, about one woman’s journey. There will be folks who find the book inspiring, and those who think it’s just so much navel-gazing. Personally, I found it fascinating to read about how Doyle realized that being truly herself was critically important (and a crucial lesson to model for her daughters), and how she had the courage to break completely away and rebuild the life she needed.
