Untamed

Summary

Glennon Doyle was, by conventional measures, thriving. She had a Christian blog with millions of readers, a nonprofit organization she founded, a marriage, children, and a speaking career built around the message of honest vulnerability. She was also, by her own account, not living the life she was actually living. Then, in the middle of a meeting, she fell in love with a woman she had never met before: Abby Wambach, the soccer player, who would become her wife.

Untamed is the story of what happened next: the dissolution of her marriage, the beginning of a relationship with Wambach, the reckoning with the gap between the self she had been performing and the self she recognized when she stopped performing. It is told in the episodic, personal-essay mode of memoir rather than in the continuous narrative of the traditional memoir, and it is addressed with unusual directness to the reader, which gives it the quality of a conversation rather than a lecture.

The book became a phenomenon during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people were forced to examine their lives in new ways. It sold more than two million copies and spent months on the bestseller lists. Whether it is the book its sales figures suggest or a somewhat narrower achievement than that is a genuinely open question, but it is certainly a book that has mattered enormously to many readers, and understanding why tells you something important about what people are looking for.

Character Arcs and Development

Doyle’s arc in the book is from performance to authenticity: from the version of herself she created to fulfill others’ expectations to the version she recognizes as genuinely herself. This arc is handled with more complexity than the self-help genre often manages, because Doyle is honest about what she is giving up as well as what she is gaining. The end of her marriage was painful. The building of a new life required dismantling structures that had taken years to construct.

Her characterization of her first husband and her children is handled with unusual care: she does not recruit them as supporting characters for her own narrative, but acknowledges them as people with their own experiences of the upheaval she is causing. Her love for her children is the book’s most consistently honest element; the pages about what she fears for them are the most unguarded she writes.

Pacing

Untamed moves in short episodes rather than sustained narrative, which makes it both easy to read in fragments and somewhat diffuse as a whole. The individual sections are often very good: sharp, funny, direct. The accumulation of those sections into a coherent argument is less certain, and some readers find the book repetitive where it is making the same point in different registers.

The book is most effective in its first half, where the specific events of Doyle’s life are doing the thematic work. The second half, which is more explicitly prescriptive, is where the self-help tendency becomes more prominent and the book’s singular voice begins to feel more generalized.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The book’s central argument is that women are trained from birth to perform a particular kind of life, and that liberation requires recognizing the performance and refusing to continue it. This is not a new argument, but Doyle makes it with a specificity and personal evidence that gives it new force. The “cheetah” metaphor, which she uses to describe the difference between the trained, domesticated self and the wild, authentic self, is somewhat overworked, but the underlying point it is making is sound and important.

Doyle is also writing about recovery, though she does not always foreground this: she is a recovering bulimic and alcoholic, and the discipline required to recover from those addictions is one of the things that trained her to recognize when she was betraying herself. The book is, in part, a generalization of the recovery memoir’s logic: the idea that you can learn to notice the gap between who you are and who you have been performing.

Style and Voice

Doyle’s prose is conversational, direct, and deliberately accessible. She is not a literary stylist in the elevated sense; her sentences are designed to be felt rather than admired, and they succeed in that aim more often than not. Her humor is genuine, her self-deprecation earned, and her earnestness, which could easily tip into sentimentality, is mostly kept honest by her willingness to include evidence that complicates her own thesis.

The book’s limitations are in many ways the flip side of its strengths: the accessibility that makes it reach so many readers also means that it does not pursue its most interesting ideas as rigorously as they deserve. The insights are real; the depth is sometimes shallower than the insight requires.

Verdict

Untamed is a genuinely valuable book that is somewhat less than its cultural moment made it. It is funny, honest, and at its best clearly illuminating about the gap between expected and authentic self. It is less sure of itself when it moves from personal narrative to universal prescription, and it is most valuable when read as the memoir it primarily is rather than as the self-help book its marketing sometimes made it.

The four-star assessment reflects a book that delivers real value to most of its readers without quite achieving the literary distinction that might warrant five. Doyle has written something generous and genuine; she has not always written something that exactly matches the ambition of what it is trying to say. That is a honest assessment, and probably what she would want.

Four stars: significant, warmly recommended, and best read for what it is rather than what it claims to be.

What is Untamed about?

Untamed is a memoir by Glennon Doyle about the moment she fell in love with soccer player Abby Wambach while still married to her first husband, and the process of rebuilding her life around her authentic self rather than the self she had been performing. It addresses themes of authenticity, liberation, religious faith, recovery from addiction, motherhood, and same-sex love.

Who is Glennon Doyle?

Glennon Doyle is an American author and activist who began her public career with a blog about recovery, faith, and family that became the website Momastery and eventually a nonprofit organization called Together Rising. Her earlier memoirs, including Carry On, Warrior and Love Warrior, were also bestsellers. She is married to retired soccer player Abby Wambach.

Is Untamed primarily a self-help book or a memoir?

Both, in different proportions in different sections. The book’s primary mode is personal essay and memoir, drawing on Doyle’s own experiences to make larger arguments about women’s lives and liberation. The second half moves more explicitly into prescriptive territory. Most readers find it most effective as memoir; the self-help sections are more familiar and less distinctive than the personal narrative.

Why did this book become so popular during the pandemic?

Untamed was published in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning in earnest, and its themes resonated powerfully with people who were being forced by circumstance to examine their lives. The book’s argument that conventional structures and expectations can be examined and rejected touched something particular in a moment when those structures were being disrupted by an external force. Its message of liberation felt relevant to millions of readers in an involuntary moment of forced reflection.

Is the book appropriate for Christian readers?

The book engages seriously with Doyle’s Christian faith and its evolution, but it is also explicitly a story about a woman leaving a heterosexual marriage for a same-sex relationship. Christian readers who are open to these themes will find the religious content substantive and honestly rendered; readers whose faith leads them to different conclusions about same-sex relationships may find the book challenging.

How does Untamed handle Doyle’s first husband and children?

With more care than the memoir genre often manages. Doyle is aware that her story affects other people who did not choose to have their lives made public, and she is careful about what she discloses of her ex-husband’s experience and her children’s. Her love for her children is the most consistently honest element of the book, and her account of the fear and grief of the transition is not softened by the fact that she is going toward something she recognizes as true.

Is there anything the book doesn’t do well?

The cheetah metaphor, used to describe the difference between trained and authentic selves, is overworked. The second half of the book is more prescriptive and less distinctive than the first. Some of the universal claims Doyle makes about women’s experience are too broad to be fully supported by her specific evidence. The book is most honest when it is most specific, and it is sometimes more confident about its universality than the material warrants.

What other books would complement Untamed?

Readers who respond to the book’s themes might also read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for a memoir about rebuilding a life around authentic self after catastrophe, or Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic for a similar argument about creative authenticity. For more rigorous feminist analysis of the structures Doyle is challenging, bell hooks’s All About Love covers some of the same territory with greater philosophical depth.