I actually don't/didn't know much about Glennon Doyle. I was curious about her after seeing her Instagram pop up in a #ShareTheMicNow, where white woman with big audiences hands their instagram accounts over to black activists to give the activists a wider audience. Then I saw that Untamed was getting good reviews and was a memoir. So I grabbed the audio from my library and took a listen.
Doyle reads the book but I pretty quickly realized that it wasn't a memoir in the traditional sense. Was it self-help? Memoirish with really quotable quotes? Are we all goddamn cheetahs? (That last one is a YES)
Doyle is funny and likable. She shares her story through, what I assume are, small chapters with blurbs about her marriage (1) and marriage (2), her kids, her coming into her homosexuality and falling in love, her work and her struggles. The self-help part comes from the cheerleader type quotes, wanting women to ditch their every day selflessness, and be a goddamn cheetah.
The common theme seems to: quit being selfless. Be selfish. At multiple points, I issued a raised fist "Fuck yeah!" and others ... not so much.
“When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world's expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.”
I would imagine it's hard to let the rest burn as a parent? I'm not clear on that, not being a parent or never will be a parent due to faulty, garbage insides. The aforementioned garbage insides makes me tune out to the parenting portion of the book (there was quite a bit).
Despite that, Doyle does seem to articulate what needs to be said very well.
“Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.”
I would recommend this book, especially read by Doyle because I loved her voice. While I didn't get the memoir part, and some pieces were more self-helpy than I wanted, I enjoyed the stories. Because Doyle is a storyteller. That's fact.
The quote I will take in my heart and to my grave from Untamed is "I am worthy of rest"
*raised fist* fuck yeah.
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