Rating - 9/10
After seeing this book on Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine book club when it came out earlier this year I knew I had to read it! Also how fabulous is this book cover?! An explosion of glitter and wonder, and just I had to read what was inside it and I do love me some glitter y’all. A lot of female celebs have raved about this book too such as Kerry Washington, Emma Watson, Debra Messing, Oprah, Adele, and more. It’s such a fun book title right? I also knew that it was an LGBTQ book & that the author was gay so I wanted to hear what her story was all about too. It just looks like a hella cool book so I had to dig into this autobiography.
About Untamed:
This is how you find yourself.
There is a voice of longing inside each woman. 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.
Glennon Doyle has denied her own discontent for many years. While at a conference one day, she looked across a room and fell in love instantly. That woman was Abby Wambach, who is a former US captain of the women’s soccer team and was there promoting her own memoir. Glennon thought to herself, ‘There She Is.’ Glennon soon realized these words came to her from within herself. For years, she had buried herself beneath numbing addictions, cultural conditioning and institutional allegiances. This voice was from the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to abandon the world’s expectations of her, she quit abandoning herself, and in return became free. She quit pleasing and started living.
Untamed is an intimate memoir & a wake-up call. It’s 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 Review:
I knew pretty soon after this book came out in early 2020 that I wanted to read this book, but when I found out that Glennon Doyle was narrating the audiobook, I thought to myself, hm, this would make a good audiobook to listen to! I listened to a sample of it before I committed to the full book and I really liked the sound of her voice! There’s something quite intimate about listening to a memoir narrated by the author of the book.
I really enjoyed listening to this audiobook! What an empowering read this was. The book starts out with Doyle telling us about a time when she was in a zoo with her children and they all go to watch this cheetah ‘run’, or basically perform for all of the kids and the adults at the zoo. Doyle’s daughter notices at one point that the Cheetah, for a moment, “turned wild again.” I really liked the opening in the book. It immediately starts us off with a story about a wild animal that is meant to be untamed, and it’s quite a good metaphor for how women live their lives. Oppressed, watched, judged, & caged to the point of where they forget who they were before they were molded and shaped to be what society deems them as ‘acceptable’.
This is Glennon Doyle’s 3rd memoir. Wild right?! I had never heard of her before this book came out.
We follow Doyle as she tells us the story of how she fell in love with a woman, Abby Wambach, Olympic gold medalist, who is now her wife. She tells us about her journey to how she came to the realization that she was in love with a woman. She tells us about her former marriage and her divorce to her ex husband, she also delves into issues such as parenting, her religion and faith, and finally coming into her own self and skin after years of feeling repressed and tamed.
I genuinely enjoyed reading or listening to this book a lot. There were chapters that spoke to me more than others, but the underlying messages sprinkled throughout this book were just so awesome. Doyle uses a lot of powerhouse phrases in this book such as finding your own freedom and what that means to you, being bold and unapologetic, empowering yourself to do whatever you want and to achieve anything you want in life, not fitting ‘the mold’, I mean I could go on. This book is essentially a self-help book, and I was here for it. I enjoyed hearing all of the stories in Doyle’s life, and some of them felt very relatable. I will say this though, at times, it did feel like this book is geared towards white suburban wealthy women because some chapters were just so unreachable for me, and at times felt kind of privileged, but, it would 100% speak to those women who can relate to her type of life than your average non wealthy white or blue or brown woman.
I truly loved the beginning of this book. It excites you and draws you in and I was like hell yes Glennon! Amen!! I’m always up for uplifting women and this book totally hit that spot. Then at times I was a tad bored with some of the chapters, but then I’d be up again! Haha She’d go into these scenarios which are just not that relatable to me, but then again draws you back in. I had a total love/hate relationship with this memoir. I will say that I loved all of the messages that Doyle would dish out in each story and it was an immensely personal story of her life. It takes some real courage to completely lay all of her personal business out there into the world as she did and I admired that.
This is a great book for ALL MOTHERS. If you’re a mom, pick this book up! Especially if you're a mom to any boys. This is also a great book for ALL WOMEN, it gives us great insight about how to be a woman of today. Doyle speaks about her experiences in raising her children. She raises them to be more empathetic, she also speaks about privilege, especially privilege parenting. She covers issues such as race & being an antiracist from a white woman’s perspective, she talks about religion, she talks about what it’s like to raise children in our day and age, and many more subjects. This is a wonderful book for parents in our current time and sort of the “Gen Z” age. Doyle also speaks about how society sees women and the expectations that we place upon ourselves due to these standards. I think we can all take something away from this read. Personally, I enjoyed it. I love any book that will make me feel good and is a bold, empowering, feminist read. Not all women will agree or love this book because at times, it did feel a little selfish or surface-y, but all in all I liked it a lot. I also LOVED hearing her voice, haha she’s very easy to listen to, highly recommend the Audiobook, and it was a relate-able read too from a woman's perspective. In the end I was cheering right along with her, I’m all for the self-love, self-renewal, and I was like fuck yea! I am WOMAN. Untamed and free to do whatever the fuck I want. Amen sister. I hear you! I also personally love a good LGBTQ coming out read, so yay for Glennon Doyle! Excellent memoir!
Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.
Song Pick:
Well, I kinda knew early on what my song pick would be while reading this book. It’s all about being strong, it’s a hopeful read, it’s empowering and has so many positive vibes. My song pick for Untamed, is ‘Brave’ by Sara Bareilles. A punchy, fun and powerful song to go with an empowering book! Fun Fact: Sara Bareilles bloody loved this book too!
Sara Bareilles said -
Source: Untamedbook.com
"Untamed. The Next great guidance from an extraordinary woman. Devouring this gospel of truth.". The next great guidance from an
Genre: Autobiography | Memoir | Self Help
Publish Date: March 10, 2020
Pages: 352 Pages
Publisher: The Dial Press