Glennon Doyle’s latest book release, Untamed (2020), has already sold over a million copies and rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It’s the memoir that captured Adele’s heart and inspired her to transform her outlook on life. The screen rights were sold to J.J. Abrams, most famously known for ruining the Star Wars franchise, who will develop it into a TV show. Known as a “mommy-blogger” (a woman who digitally chronicles the cheers and woes of her married life and parenting journey), Doyle’s past memoirs Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior both achieved critical acclaim because of her seemingly honest (and often glib) insight into her marriage and family life. Untamed is a confession, a chance for Doyle to rewrite the dishonest presentation of her marriage and happiness that appeared in those novels. Untamed is a memoir of how Doyle escaped the cult of heteronormative expectations in delightful doses of insight and vulnerability.
In her memoir, Doyle highlights the boundaries society strips away from women, and the recurring ways we’ll punish our bodies and spirits in order to conform. She felt trapped by the expectations that were demanded of her: be a good Christian woman, a doting mother, a wife who would stay by her husband’s side, regardless of how often he turned to other women for sex. Her other bestselling memoir, Love Warrior, detailed her escapades of successful family-wrangling, her connection to God, and how she learned to forgive and to repair the dignity and security her husband took from her. Untamed is far more satisfying. Doyle’s discovery of her sexuality, of her desperate escape from heterosexual ordeals, makes for a raw, hypnotizing read. Her survival of drug addiction, alcoholism, and bulimia showcase the ugliness of conformity — and what can happen to us when we believe we’ve failed to meet those expectations.
While her essays are short, digestible, and overflowing with her humorous wit, Doyle also tends to express herself as hyperbolically as possible. Where Untamed falters is Doyle’s handling of every modern social injustice known to mankind. So much of her book is raw, empowering, and genuinely interesting to read, but she thwarts her own success by tackling topics such as racism with a profoundly disappointing ineptitude. White parents should be having conversations with their children about race disparity and the violence that kills people of colour at disproportionate rates, but that conversation doesn’t need to be written out for the sake of displaying it in a memoir, penned by a white woman. Doyle has branched away from fundamentalist values and the cozy privilege of silence it once awarded her, but in her eagerness to shed her former identity, she tries far too hard to incorporate a variety of topics that aren’t well-researched enough to properly belong in the memoir.
Overall, Untamed is a survivor’s account of how a woman broke free from the “cage of expectations,” fell in love with another woman, and left an emotionally cruel man in order to save her family. Despite her lacklustre effort to address an abundance of social topics and her often exaggerated expressions, Untamed is a telling memoir meant to embrace the radical notion of creating your own happiness and refusing to explain it to anyone else.
