“When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”
– Glennon Doyle, Untamed
I’ve never read anything like Untamed. But then there is no one like Glennon Doyle. I’ve followed her work and words for years, and always admired her ability to be completely raw and open and vulnerable, telling it exactly as it is in the most eloquent and often entertaining of ways. I knew this book would be her greatest masterpiece yet. Every other page corner is now turned down, sentence after sentence after paragraph highlighted, an attempt to soak up every inch of wisdom. She is brilliant, hilarious, and incredibly emotionally attuned.
This is a book I will gently encourage my daughter to read one day (anything more enthusiastic and she’ll reject it..) and hope she takes note of the many beautiful truths woven throughout.
Doyle’s writing is always insightful and engaging, with her many metaphors and stories. The book reads more as a collection of short essays than longer chronological chapters. She covers many topics; motherhood, families, relationships, mental illness, feeling your feelings, womanhood, feminism, race…
The running theme is letting go of the world’s expectations in order to reclaim your true self. Untamed is a manifesto for how to live authentically. A powerful read that I’ll always refer back to.
“I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths. My goal is not to remain the same but to live in such a way that each day, year, moment, relationship, conversation, and crisis is the material I use to become a truer, more beautiful version of myself. The goal is to surrender, constantly, who I just was in order to become who this next moment calls me to be. I will not hold on to a single existing idea, opinion, identify, story, or relationship that keeps me from emerging new. I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then.”
– Glennon Doyle, Untamed
The Colourful Kind 