My kids were at the exact right age for me to appreciate Glennon Doyle when her Momastery blog posts first went viral. Her "Don't Carpe Diem" post really resonated with me, and I also loved her post about how a teacher looked out for lonely students in her classroom.
As my kids grew up, I drifted away from mom blogs. At some point, I heard that Glennon Doyle got divorced and married Abby Wambach the soccer player!? Well, I didn't follow the news, and I haven't read her previous two books, but a friend of mine gifted this book to me, so I read it.
Untamed is mostly short chapters that read like blog entries. It's part memoir, part self-help. Glennon shares the story of how she answered the question, "Who was I before I became who the world told me to be?" (p. 6). The title Untamed refers to the evolution by which she unlearned the expectations imposed by society and learned to know, trust, and be her true self. Using analogies and examples from her own life, she urges her readers to "search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval." (p. 60) I was impressed with her openness in sharing her personal story and journey from feeling broken to feeling whole.
About halfway through this book, I was prepared to give it a 3-star rating. The ideas were not without merit, but as I have always been a self-reflective and thinking person, they were not new or revelatory to me. In fact, I had a little chuckle when literally the last line of prose in the book finally acknowledged that some people "never become tamed in the first place." (p. 333) Though this first half of the book wasn't exactly relatable for me, I could imagine that her target audience - women who felt "tamed", or caged - would have much to appreciate. Glennon's message is uplifting and encouraging and basically gives readers permission to do whatever is true to themselves, even if it flies in the face of convention. Maybe "permission" isn't the right word, because the whole point is that no one needs permission to control their own lives, but she does provide readers with reassurance that it's okay to do what's right for you, even if others think you are selfish or crazy or weak or a weirdo.
I was pleasantly surprised when my interest piqued as the book progressed, and I decided to bump up the rating to 4 stars. It felt like a bit of an epiphany when she laid out how women have been trained to believe in an elusive ideal of womanhood that actually erases us as individuals, i.e., how "[t]he highest praise [is]: She is so selfless... The epitome of womanhood is to lose one's self completely." (p. 116) She astutely wrote about how her philanthropy led her to understand that "[w]here there is great suffering, there is often great profit," (p. 254) and I also just liked one of her core tenets: "We can do hard things." (pg. 291)
Finally, I think it's noteworthy that Glennon devoted a lengthy, weighty chapter to racism. Again, she did not write anything groundbreaking or eye-opening to me, but she quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.'s views on white moderates and challenged her readers to take a good look at themselves and ask how they might be inadvertently contributing to white supremacy in America. I saw this chapter as Glennon planting seeds of antiracism in an audience of liberal white women who might not otherwise take the time to listen or engage in self-examination. Along the same lines, given her reputation as a Christian blogger, I liked that she used her platform to present LGBTQ and pro-choice perspectives to an audience that might typically lean anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice. In the end, the book seemed to have a "Come for the feminist self-care, stay for the introduction to social justice" kind of vibe.
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