Untamed

 Book 59 of my 2020 Reading Challenge

read from August 31 - September 10 

Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

Summary (via the book jacket)

published 2020

There is a voice of longing inside each of us. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn't it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent - even from ourselves.

For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There. She. Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice - the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world's expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member's ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us 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 so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

My Opinion

4 stars

This is the kind of book that is more about the experience.  I believe a reader will already know going in whether they will enjoy reading it or not.  So while this won't be much of a review on the book itself, I have opinions and would love to talk about them with someone that has read it.

I really liked this format because each section is only a few pages long so I could read it and then sit with it.  The story about eating and the differences between asking teen girls and teen boys if they're hungry really resonated with me as something incredibly obvious once it was pointed out but not something I'd ever noticed before.

It was very intense which I enjoyed as a reader but also made me squirm, as most memoirs do, when I think about the other people mentioned, particularly her children.  But she seems better equipped than most to handle their boundaries appropriately so this isn't a negative about this specific book, more something I notice about my own reactions whenever I read a memoir.

A Few Quotes from the Book

"Because what scares me a hell of a lot more than pain is living my entire life and missing my becoming. What scares me more than feeling it all is missing it all."

"Listen. Every time you're given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself."

"Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you're there because you hit a triple."