Review of Untamed by Glennon Doyle
I once passed graffiti that read “our heads are circular so our thoughts can change direction”. Such is the nature of “Untamed” by activist and best-selling author Glennon Doyle. With rich prose and intimate reflection, Doyle picks up where her previous memoir “Love Warrior” left off — reflecting on her relationship with soccer star Abby Wambauch, sudden divorce, sobriety, and child-rearing in the age of Trump. “Allow me to rewrite my own description,” implores Doyle, “I am forty-four years old. With all my chin hairs and pain and contradictions, I am flawless, and unbroken.” Describing her actualized self as a “spark [that] was always inside me, smoldering”, the memoir is wildly chaotic and jumps from her childhood to child-rearing in the digital age in a matter of pages. In this way, Doyle’s ruminations of her past are left beautifully incomplete — “We want to be forgiven. We cannot forgive. We don’t understand God. We believe. We absolutely do not believe. We are lonely. We want to be left alone. We want to belong.” Rising actions, such as her conflict with the Evangelical church aren’t fully resolved — she remains tentative, confessing “I don’t know if I would call myself a Christian”. This chaos proves to be the true gift of “Untamed” — Doyle refuses to tie up loose ends or rationalize her decision-making. “Let your ideas mature gradually, implored the famed Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin, “let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.” With great restrain and resolve, Doyle resists the troupe of other emerging “self help” memoirs that seem to have it all together — conflicts of faith, family, and love cannot be wrapped in pretty parchment paper. “It is the story of how each of us,” writes Doyle, “can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts.”
Doyle isn’t a stranger to hardship — the former Christian blogger turned more than a few heads after outing herself following her second book tour. “There is no glory except through your story,” declares Doyle. “Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming.” Nevertheless, what is not readily apparent in a close-reading of the memoir is Doyle’s differentiation between the temporal pain that is needed to evolve and the shame in response to it that creates an internal state of inadequacy, dishonor, and disconnection. While the author claims that “shamelessness is [her] spiritual practice”, her recurring observations such as “because who I will become tomorrow is so unforeseeable and specific that I’ll need every bit of today’s lesson to become her” seem to suggest that pain has only temporal effects that you just have to “feel”, aptly the name of the chapter, and fight your way through. But as researcher (and Doyle’s friend) Brene Brown points out, shame functions to not only make us feel flawed but also unworthy of love and belonging. In view of Doyle’s metaphor, these hidden layers prevent us from Doyle’s mantra of “feeling it all” and living a life that is “Untamed”. In her failure to differentiate between the two, Doyle misses a critical opportunity to explore how shame warps our “wildest instincts” by producing feelings of hopelessness and despair. For many many readers, the real work is not the pain itself but the underlying delusion that we deserve to be tamed.
Doyle’s query, “Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this?” is not new. “As she made the beds,” wrote Betty Friedan in “Feminine Mystique” decades earlier, “shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’”. For Friedan, that “all” meant employment, for Doyle, it means the ability to self-actualize outside the constraints of sexism and societal expectations. One could certainly argue that the memoir suffers from the same pitfalls as the feminist works by middle-class white women. Doyle’s examination of hardship does not expand to incorporate the lives of women without children, minority women, or poor women. Notably, her descriptions of material wealth, leisure, and privilege seem light-years away from those that Bell Hooks describes in “From Margin to Center”, a critique of white, middle-class feminism. Without a doubt, the process of “untaming” looks different for women of color who have been systematically discriminated against. I would have hoped that Doyle’s examinations of hardship, especially in light of her work with Black Friday (a group run by women of color to foster racial conversation), would have been more inclusive of the collective pain experienced by marginalized groups. But perhaps this is too much to ask for, considering Doyles’ positionality as a white woman writing a memoir who herself concedes her privilege and, “I am a white woman who has come to the conclusion that the reason people call me a racist when I show up to speak about racism is that I am showing up as I am and I have racism in me.” Damn it, if only we could all be so honest. These are the moments that make Doyle shine as an author — her willingness to deal with the complexity of hot button-issues, not always get it right, and not always have a resolution. The author’s unmistakable grace for herself (she often cites Maya Angelou, “when you know better, you can do better”) and contentment with “slow growth” is a poignant invitation to the reader herself. I am here for it.
