Glennon Doyle

Glennon Doyle is an American memoirist and activist whose book Untamed became a number-one bestseller for its raw, liberating account of leaving a conventional life to claim her own.

Glennon Doyle built a following through her blog and earlier memoirs before Untamed, published in 2020, became the kind of cultural phenomenon that makes otherwise reluctant readers evangelise a book to everyone they know. The memoir charts her decision to leave her marriage, fall in love with soccer player Abby Wambach, and reconstruct her understanding of what she owed to herself rather than to the expectations built around her — as a Christian woman, a mother, a wife, and a public figure of a certain kind.

Doyle’s voice is her strongest asset: confessional, direct, funny, and warm without being uncritical of herself. The book’s central argument — that women in particular are socialised to suppress their own knowing in service of others’ comfort, and that reclaiming that knowing is both possible and necessary — resonated enormously with its primary readership. The format moves between memoir sections and shorter, more essayistic pieces, and the variation keeps the momentum alive.

Untamed has also attracted criticism, including from within feminist discourse. Some readers find Doyle’s self-presentation idealising in ways that gloss over her own privilege — the freedom to rebuild her life as described is not equally available to all women. Others find the prose style occasionally sentimental or repetitive. These are legitimate observations. But for readers going through their own versions of the reckoning Doyle describes, the book offers something real: the sense that the life you’ve been performing can be examined, and possibly revised.