Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living

parts of this were 4 stars, parts of it lost me completely. i nearly tapped out at 30%, before it picked up and got great. then from about 60% onwards it meandered between okay and bad and i was just listening along wanting for it to be over.

i liked a lot about this, and i think i would've preferred it if it was more memoir, less inspo. i didn't gel with a lot of her advice in the beginning, and found it more powerful when she spoke about her own experiences and how she overcame them. eg: being fireproof (the burning bush allegory was a nice touch) and that emotions are there to be felt.

i loooveed when she described meeting her wife, i wish to read a book simply about her gushing about how much she loves her, their relationship is really sweet.

its a very religious/spiritual book, and gets very preachy at parts even though i think she's trying not to be. she also talks a lot about 1 child and how much they are bonded in great detail and only briefly mentions her other two children - this is obviously not a huge deal but was just something i noticed.

I am not the target demographic for this book. This was a read suggested for the two-person book club a friend and I started, and I was looking for something different. I had already been thinking about picking up a memoir, so this seemed fitting. However, Glennon Doyle didn't write this for me (I doubt she would say she wrote it for anyone but herself). I have been queer for longer than Doyle, I've been thinking about patriarchal structures and gender expectations since I was 11. I became obsessed with Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism at 18, so I've been processing how values are mutable for quite some time. This book is not for that kind of person. It is for the type of woman who has been so busy keeping up with what has been asked of her, that she has had little mind to ask where she and what is being asked diverge. It's for privileged white moms, for the most part. It's for people that are just beginning their journey of questioning the world around them.

And I think it's pretty appropriate in that respect. Untamed is less of a memoir and more of an educational text, as the details Doyle provides of her life are largely anecdotal and more exist to serve the larger messages and themes she wants to discuss. It is a primer, if you will, on becoming more aware of yourself and society around you, using Doyle's many own mistakes and learning as a reference point. The central thesis is that when you take care of yourself first, value your own desires and needs and self-worth, then not only will you be more fulfilled, but the people around you that you love will benefit more than if you neglected yourself to put their needs first. Not a revolutionary concept by any means, and if you spend enough time on the right side of TikTok, you're likely to find plenty a 25-year-old saying the same thing and then some. Doyle's style honestly resembles TikTok, doling out her experiences and wisdom in bite-sized chapters that, as one reviewer said, seem made to put on an Instagram inspirational post.

Doyle's style of prose is florid and a bit overindulgent, but I suppose that's how she intends to keep your attention. It's charming for a while, but sometimes I felt like she was just padding out page count. She is fan of metaphors, something she willingly admits, and she uses everything from cheetahs to doorbells to make her point. Not to mention repetition. While there is plenty of self-deprecating humor, in general, she is achingly sincere. Like utterly cringe. She transcribes the words of her friends and family in a way that is just far too perfect and sanded-over to be true. When she talked about talking to her teenage son's friends and coaxing out a more heartfelt conversation from them, I couldn't help but think “Oh god, she's that mom.” Like, crunchy, God-loving, everything-is-a-form-of-therapy mom. In her mid-forties, after the life she's had, she has every right to be as cringe-worthy as she likes, honestly.

I do wish Doyle had kept things more personal at times, because the chapters on racial injustice and even sexual identity felt particularly stale and out of place. But, as stated, this is like a beginner's manual. If you are, say, a woman in her fifties, who's child just came out as gay, then a book like this might help you to begin. If you're starting to question the biases and prejudices that were programmed in you, this book may give you the confidence and the language to start learning more. But I think where this book really excels is when Doyle talks about boundaries, and how to make decisions that are right for you, even if they are not right for other people. How to recognize your emotions and what they are saying to you, and how best to serve others by serving yourself.

And by the look of some of the other reviews, some people were not ready for that information. I get it, it can seem counterintuitive to claim that its healthy and good actually to tell your mother she can't see her grandchildren until she processes her internalized homophobia. But giving yourself space also means giving others their space to do their own work. The same way good fences make good neighbors, walking away when you realize you can't accept an apology is good for everyone involved, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

So yeah, I think this has value. Does it drone on way too long and venture into territory it probably should have left for others? Goodness, yes. It is an unwinding of patriarchal structures from the perspective of someone who has largely benefited from those structures her entire life, so of course, its reach is going to limited. However, I wonder if this book will mostly end up in the hands of people who a) are already aware of most of this, or b) only capable of looking at this from a superficial level. You know, the ones who are calling her a narcissist for talking about herself so much...in her own memoir. Or those who don't understand the difference between Doyle talking about the way women internalize society's expectations regarding appearances, and being “obsessed with looks.” Just saying, not trying to start beef or anything, but there are some insecurities showing up in these reviews. Overall, this book is fine, with a few solid gems of wisdom, but I think she could have gotten her point across just as well in an essay instead of a whole book.

DNF

This is not a book meant for me. This woman is the personification of post-modernism and the chaos that it brings. This woman believes everyone else was “keeping her locked up” for the bulk of her life, and while there may be deep trauma from her first marriage and issues in her childhood that led her to feel this way, this book dives into none of that, in fact, I don't think the author has dived into that in her actual life.

Glennon Doyle is a full grown adult that acts like a 20 year old who is finally finding herself, you can be happy for her, but you're also rolling your eyes at her “wisdom”. The piece of this book that made me set it down is that Glennon claims to be Christian, but goes ahead and makes up whatever she'd like and calls it “truth”. Instead of realizing that she will never be perfect, she makes up a religion that says she already is - this woman needs therapy, not a publishing deal.

Small note; listening to the audiobook read by the author really helps you feel the cringe and self-absorption that radiates from this woman. Rachel Hollis, do you have a sister?

Unpopular opinion alert:

This entire book is a justification for the author's life choices. And while that's all fine and well, it's also annoying af. It reads like a self help book for the self unaware. The problem I have is that the author is trying to convince you to drop your religion, morals, and obligations to others and live solely by your id, aka your “knowing” or the small inner voice we all have. Also, redeclare your id as your god.

Really disliked this book. After talking with some friends who enjoyed it, a hypothesis on why I didn't like it is that this is my first experience with Glennon. If you've followed her story and read her other work this one would probably hit different for you.

To me, it was preachy, unrealistic (like... who talks like that in the moment to their children/partners/colleagues/friends? I gave it a good go and listened as I painted my bathroom, but there was a lot of eye rolling and the only word that kept coming up was “insufferable.” I finished painting, but I couldn't finish the book. Hard pass.

Unpopular Opinion Alert

This was an utter disappointment to me after what started out as a great book. After about the first 40ish pages the author completely lost my attention and the want to even keep reading. I loved the premise of this one but there was so much that irked me about this one...most especially the fact that she says her kids suck but that it's somehow not her fault because she didn't get the memo on how to raise them??!!

I can't STAND ish like this. She even says she shoved an iPad at the last one and let that raise her and it somehow made her daughter a better and stronger person...but her kids suck??!!

Nothing has brought me greater joy than diving head-first into this memoir. Do I like memoirs? No. Do I have kids? No. Am I gay? Also no. Did I love the hell out of this book? Abso-freaking-lutely. What a feeling it is to empathize with another woman about the various tipsy turvey mountain of a life this is. I think I cried a different time for over half the chapters in this book (that NEVER happens). I honestly feel liberated. Glennon Doyle has such a way of describing in this book, which I would determine is composed of many mini-chapters (mini-tangents but potent with reflection and morality). Let's just say in the span of 48 hours, I've listened to this book twice and I bought the hard copy for underlining/bookmarking/ and future cherishing. This book is bible. It creates space for the reader to reflect, process, create, sink, be free, grow and grow some more and then when you couldn't take any more grow a liiiiiiiiittle more. I appreciate this book because in Glennons reflection about her role as a mother, I remembered my own childhood. I have been Tish, Glennon, Amma, Liz, and her mom in various situations during my life in moments and all at the same time. This book will be the book of the year for 2020-mark my words. And read this goddamn book dude. 6⭐️/5

I have to say, after all the hype about this book I was pretty disappointed. I read upwards of 50 books a year, both fiction and nonfiction, and I almost never quit, and I can appreciate lots of different kinds of literature. But I quit this one after about two hours of reading because I was bored. The first chapter was really well written and was quite a good hook to bring one enthusiastically into the book, and I had high hopes. But the more it went on the more it was just kind of repetitions of the same theme, and I lost interest. it just didn't really speak to me. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood or at the right time of my life to read this, but that's the way it is. If you want to read memoirs about women discovering their purpose and true identity, I would highly recommend Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad and My Own Blood by Ashley Bristowe.