Untamed, by Glennon Doyle
This book was very unputdownable. I love the courage and healing that I read between every line
in this book. It was a clean crisp and gripping read from the very beginning. It managed to be both
tender and abrasive in the trending “woke” type of way everyone describes. Doyle begins with a
story of a cheetah at the zoo bred in captivity but instinctually craving more beyond her learned
life, and cage. She uses this story as an analogy to explain women, womanhood, and the boxes we’re
bred to occupy.
With each chapter, she touches on one or two points related to these boxes/cages by using
personal experiences and and her family (2 daughters, 1 son, her wife and ex-husband). How
commercialism with basic hygiene products set us up for failure with their bold, aggressive, ‘go-
and-do’ print on male products and their excess of flowery disconnected adjectives on how to be
(rather than do) on female products. How therapists focus on mending marriages through walking
patients out of their hurt, rather than identifying and understanding that hurt. How her parents
supported her new happiness (as a newly gay woman) so late in life.
She discusses the pleasures and pains of parenthood and how her daughter’s concern for the
extinction of polar bears drove her mad and then humbled her back to a place of simple genuine
caring. Though, I think this section was dulled a bit by repetition.
As a reader I found myself wholly immersed in the stories, the memories. I believed it all. I smiled
widely, raised my eyebrows in deep understanding, commiseration, and mostly felt nudged in the
direction she took. Persuasive!
As a writer, I enjoyed her writing style; the book reads as a conversation, a conference… a pleasant,
welcomed diatribe. Doyle “shows” us what breaking out of the cages means with her anecdotes and
morals/ takeaways, careful not to “tell” us what to think or how to feel. But also conveying, mostly
implying, how she felt through the use of body language, everyday products and food, place settings
and the memories she decided to use.
There are points of overuse and repetitive adjectives that slow the pace just slightly. But she does a
clean job of reeling you in that you’re unaware of the handful of shortcomings.