The September 2020 Military Families Book Club pick is “Untamed.”
Glennon Doyle’s latest blockbuster memoir tackles breaking free: from expectations, from social norms and niceties, from anything holding you back from a life that is authentic to you.
“Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else,” Doyle writes to her preteen daughter.
“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
The celebrated writer first shot to viral fame with her brutally honest version of a 2009 ‘25 Things About Me’ Facebook challenge and her blog, Momastery, where her willingness to bare the ugly truths of her life and explore their meaning connected deeply with readers.
A whirlwind of memoirs followed: “Carry On, Warrior,” which addressed her struggles with alcohol and eating disorders, and “Love Warrior,” an Oprah’s Book Club selection that chronicled the devastation and painstaking reconstruction of her marriage after her husband revealed years of infidelities.
In “Untamed,” her third memoir and New York Times bestseller, Doyle reckons with multiple realizations about her life: her marriage is beyond repair, she’s fallen in love with someone else, and she can’t continue with a book tour about her supposedly healed marriage without telling these new truths.
“Untamed” brings readers up-to-date on the seismic changes in Doyle’s life, through the end of her marriage, falling in love with a woman (soccer superstar Abby Wambach), to the joint creation of Together Rising, a philanthropic endeavor that’s collectively raised more than $25 million for smaller, on-the-ground charitable organizations.
Doyle deftly weaves the often complex concepts of feminism, creating a life that is true to you, anti-racism, and finding confidence along the way into this compelling and inspirational narrative crafted from a series of interconnected short essays. This book may even help you heal parts of yourself you didn’t know were broken.
Her advice cuts through the clutter of a complicated world, and offers readers grace as they figure out how to live their own lives in a similarly untamed way. “Being a human is hard, so change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy,” she writes.
She explores her own lessons and experiences with humility, with trying and failing and trying again, and she especially shines when discussing how she attempts to move through the world with empathy. On the dismissiveness toward sensitive people, Doyle offers: “It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.”
And although the book occasionally veers into what might be considered kooky – decisions are made based on whether they make the decider feel warm or cold, her connection to deeper truths and the God she believes in is referred to as Knowing – the message is simply this: to trust in yourself. Doyle’s latest tour-de-force gives readers the opportunity to learn alongside her as she does the same.
