Untamed

Let me admit something: I read this purely out of voyeuristic interest in the author, Glennon Doyle, and her now-wife, U.S. soccer legend Abby Wambach. It was available from my library on my kindle, so I thought, why the hell not.

Let me admit something else: I read it from start to finish.

Glennon Doyle is a memoirist, the author of Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior. Both detail her journey to overcome her eating disorder and addiction, and her husband’s infidelities. She was one of the most prominent Christian “mommy bloggers.” As she set out to tour on Love Warrior, she met Abby Wambach, who was promoting her own memoir, Forward. They fall in love. That’s where the book begins: “Four years ago, married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.”

Doyle takes us on her journey of finding herself, her sexuality, and how she copes with the world’s reaction. There was a lot I didn’t like about it, to be honest — it was very preachy, she capitalized a lot of things that maybe didn’t need to be capitalized. But, on the flip side, there was a lot I loved about it: her honesty. The way she tells stories. The way she’s willing to look within herself and reveal ugly truths. And, there were a bunch of passages I highlighted.

In talking about her eldest son getting a cellphone, Doyle writes, “So even when he wasn’t on his phone, he was gone. He was just hovering among us. His eyes changed. They became a little duller and heavier. They’d been the brightest eyes I’d ever seen, and then, one day, they just weren’t. In his phone, Chase had found a place easier to exist in than inside his own skin. That was tragic, because inside the itchiness of our own skin is where we discover who we are.” The itchiness of our own skin. What a concept!! I love that!! Later, in the chapter she writes, “But I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them.” It makes me think of how my sister and I used to fill our boredom, and let our imaginations run wild.

I’ll leave you with another Glennon Doyle quote, this one from an interview she did with NPR, but gives you a sense of the ~vibe~ of Untamed:

One of the reasons it is so hard to find our inner voice is because the voices outside of us are so loud. Over time, we have lived more and more of an exterior life. Right? We are always looking at our phones. We are always listening to the TV. We are always listening to outer voices. And so one of the things that changed my life is a practice of spending a few minutes a day just with no other voices, and just listening. Getting back in touch with the inner voice ... I do not think that everyone needs to leave their husband and marry a female Olympian — although I highly recommend it — but what I do think is that everyone needs to practice honoring that inner voice.

Rating: ★★★★