Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living by Glennon Doyle

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD! “Packed with incredible insight about what it means to be a woman today.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick) In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • Cosmopolitan • Marie Claire • Bloomberg • Parade • “Untamed will liberate women—emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is phenomenal.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat Pray Love This is how you find yourself. There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves. For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living. Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is. Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

parts of this were 4 stars, parts of it lost me completely. i nearly tapped out at 30%, before it picked up and got great. then from about 60% onwards it meandered between okay and bad and i was just listening along wanting for it to be over.

i liked a lot about this, and i think i would've preferred it if it was more memoir, less inspo. i didn't gel with a lot of her advice in the beginning, and found it more powerful when she spoke about her own experiences and how she overcame them. eg: being fireproof (the burning bush allegory was a nice touch) and that emotions are there to be felt.

i loooveed when she described meeting her wife, i wish to read a book simply about her gushing about how much she loves her, their relationship is really sweet.

its a very religious/spiritual book, and gets very preachy at parts even though i think she's trying not to be. she also talks a lot about 1 child and how much they are bonded in great detail and only briefly mentions her other two children - this is obviously not a huge deal but was just something i noticed.

I am not the target demographic for this book. This was a read suggested for the two-person book club a friend and I started, and I was looking for something different. I had already been thinking about picking up a memoir, so this seemed fitting. However, Glennon Doyle didn't write this for me (I doubt she would say she wrote it for anyone but herself). I have been queer for longer than Doyle, I've been thinking about patriarchal structures and gender expectations since I was 11. I became obsessed with Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism at 18, so I've been processing how values are mutable for quite some time. This book is not for that kind of person. It is for the type of woman who has been so busy keeping up with what has been asked of her, that she has had little mind to ask where she and what is being asked diverge. It's for privileged white moms, for the most part. It's for people that are just beginning their journey of questioning the world around them.

And I think it's pretty appropriate in that respect. Untamed is less of a memoir and more of an educational text, as the details Doyle provides of her life are largely anecdotal and more exist to serve the larger messages and themes she wants to discuss. It is a primer, if you will, on becoming more aware of yourself and society around you, using Doyle's many own mistakes and learning as a reference point. The central thesis is that when you take care of yourself first, value your own desires and needs and self-worth, then not only will you be more fulfilled, but the people around you that you love will benefit more than if you neglected yourself to put their needs first. Not a revolutionary concept by any means, and if you spend enough time on the right side of TikTok, you're likely to find plenty a 25-year-old saying the same thing and then some. Doyle's style honestly resembles TikTok, doling out her experiences and wisdom in bite-sized chapters that, as one reviewer said, seem made to put on an Instagram inspirational post.

Doyle's style of prose is florid and a bit overindulgent, but I suppose that's how she intends to keep your attention. It's charming for a while, but sometimes I felt like she was just padding out page count. She is fan of metaphors, something she willingly admits, and she uses everything from cheetahs to doorbells to make her point. Not to mention repetition. While there is plenty of self-deprecating humor, in general, she is achingly sincere. Like utterly cringe. She transcribes the words of her friends and family in a way that is just far too perfect and sanded-over to be true. When she talked about talking to her teenage son's friends and coaxing out a more heartfelt conversation from them, I couldn't help but think “Oh god, she's that mom.” Like, crunchy, God-loving, everything-is-a-form-of-therapy mom. In her mid-forties, after the life she's had, she has every right to be as cringe-worthy as she likes, honestly.

I do wish Doyle had kept things more personal at times, because the chapters on racial injustice and even sexual identity felt particularly stale and out of place. But, as stated, this is like a beginner's manual. If you are, say, a woman in her fifties, who's child just came out as gay, then a book like this might help you to begin. If you're starting to question the biases and prejudices that were programmed in you, this book may give you the confidence and the language to start learning more. But I think where this book really excels is when Doyle talks about boundaries, and how to make decisions that are right for you, even if they are not right for other people. How to recognize your emotions and what they are saying to you, and how best to serve others by serving yourself.

And by the look of some of the other reviews, some people were not ready for that information. I get it, it can seem counterintuitive to claim that its healthy and good actually to tell your mother she can't see her grandchildren until she processes her internalized homophobia. But giving yourself space also means giving others their space to do their own work. The same way good fences make good neighbors, walking away when you realize you can't accept an apology is good for everyone involved, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

So yeah, I think this has value. Does it drone on way too long and venture into territory it probably should have left for others? Goodness, yes. It is an unwinding of patriarchal structures from the perspective of someone who has largely benefited from those structures her entire life, so of course, its reach is going to limited. However, I wonder if this book will mostly end up in the hands of people who a) are already aware of most of this, or b) only capable of looking at this from a superficial level. You know, the ones who are calling her a narcissist for talking about herself so much...in her own memoir. Or those who don't understand the difference between Doyle talking about the way women internalize society's expectations regarding appearances, and being “obsessed with looks.” Just saying, not trying to start beef or anything, but there are some insecurities showing up in these reviews. Overall, this book is fine, with a few solid gems of wisdom, but I think she could have gotten her point across just as well in an essay instead of a whole book.

JUP. Read it, weep, take stock of your life, act accordingly. It's been awhile since a book delivered a sentence, an idea, a moment that has made me weep in recognition.

AUDIOBOOK

This book was incredible. So many little nuggets of hope, insight, and bravery. Highly recommend. Be open to allowing this book to challenge your beliefs.