Glennon Doyle
Glennon Doyle was born in 1976 in Burke, Virginia, and grew up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in a family she has described as loving but ill-equipped to help her manage the anxiety, bulimia, and alcoholism that took hold in her adolescence and early adulthood. She attended Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and struggled through her twenties with addiction and disordered eating. A pregnancy at twenty-six—which she discovered while in a treatment center—became the turning point that led her to get sober and commit to building a different kind of life.
Doyle began writing about her experiences on a blog, Momastery, in 2009, initially sharing her struggles with faith, motherhood, and the gap between the life she performed and the one she actually lived. Her writing was raw, funny, and confessional in a way that resonated powerfully with readers who recognized their own hidden struggles in hers. The blog grew into one of the most widely read personal essays platforms of its era, and Momastery’s community of readers—whom Doyle called her monkees—became the foundation for a significant cultural platform.
Her first book, Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life (2013), extended her blog’s voice into a full-length memoir and collection of essays about faith, marriage, motherhood, and recovery. Her second book, Love Warrior (2016), a memoir about her marriage’s near-collapse after her husband Craig’s infidelity was revealed, became an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a New York Times bestseller, bringing her work to a significantly larger audience.
Her third book, Untamed, published in 2020, became the defining work of her career. Opening with the moment she fell in love with soccer star Abby Wambach (now her wife) while still married to Craig, the book was a sustained argument for what Doyle called becoming untamed—dismantling the conditioning that teaches women to be smaller, quieter, and more accommodating than their truest selves require. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and spent over a hundred weeks there, becoming one of the bestselling memoirs of the decade and a touchstone of a particular strain of feminist self-actualization.
Glennon Doyle continues to write, podcast with her sister Amanda Doyle and wife Abby Wambach on the show “We Can Do Hard Things,” and lead Together Rising, the nonprofit she founded that has raised tens of millions of dollars for humanitarian causes. Her work reflects the possibilities and the tensions of a mode of public self-revelation that uses personal transformation as the medium for broader cultural argument—at once deeply intimate and explicitly political.
