How to Apply Untamed

Name: Untamed
Author: Glennon Doyle

A memoir that dares you to trust your own restlessness instead of everyone else's rules

Glennon Doyle

8 Key Insights

About This Book

In a zoo, a captive cheetah runs the same fenced track every day for a scrap of steak, and Glennon Doyle can't stop thinking about what that says about the rest of us. Doyle, the bestselling memoirist behind Love Warrior, traces how she left a marriage, left evangelical Christianity, and built a new family with soccer star Abby Wambach by questioning every rule she'd been handed about being good. Untamed moves through addiction, an eating disorder, anxiety, and a very public reinvention to argue that the restlessness you've been trying to talk yourself out of might be the truest, most reliable thing about you.

About the Author

Glennon Doyle is a writer who built a large following writing candidly about addiction, marriage, faith, and motherhood, including in her earlier bestselling memoir Love Warrior, about surviving her first husband's infidelity. She is the founder of Together Rising, an organization that has moved millions of dollars toward crises including family separations at the US border. In Untamed, Doyle writes as someone who left both that marriage and the evangelical church she grew up in to build a new life with wife and former soccer star Abby Wambach, and who has lived through bulimia, alcoholism, and clinical depression and anxiety, conditions she writes about directly, not from a distance.

Biggest Takeaway

You'll learn to catch yourself numbing a hard feeling instead of letting it move through you, and to trust that you can survive far more than you assumed. You'll have an actual practice for big decisions, sitting in stillness instead of polling everyone you know, that works as well in a work meeting as it does at three in the morning. You'll start noticing which of your daily shoulds are inherited rules rather than your own choices, and get language for questioning them without spiraling into guilt. You'll also learn to read your own anger and restlessness as useful information rather than problems to suppress.