Where to Start with Glennon Doyle: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Glennon Doyle — how to approach Untamed, her memoir-as-manifesto about leaving her conditioned life behind, written around falling in love with soccer player Abby Wambach and learning to trust her own inner knowing. A complete reading guide.
By Lena Fischer
Glennon Doyle (born 1976 in Burke, Virginia) is an American author, activist, and podcast host who first built an audience through her blog Momastery and her first memoir Carry On, Warrior (2013). Her second memoir Love Warrior (2016) was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Untamed (2020) was her third memoir and by far her most widely read — it spent over 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold millions of copies. She is the founder of Together Rising, a non-profit focused on women and families in crisis, and is married to soccer player and activist Abby Wambach.
Where to Start: Untamed (2020)
When Untamed landed in March 2020 — the same month most of the developed world entered lockdown — its argument about conditioning, authenticity, and the courage required to live an uncaged life found an audience that had just been given, involuntarily, the time to consider it. Untamed opens with a story about a cheetah named Tabitha at a zoo in Tampa — a cheetah who has been raised in captivity and has learned to perform domestication, to live within the constraints of the enclosure, and has no memory of running. Doyle uses this image throughout the book as a metaphor for what she argues happens to women: trained from childhood to suppress instinct, to perform acceptability, to live within invisible enclosures whose walls they cannot see until something breaks them open.
The conditioning argument is the book’s analytical foundation. Doyle distinguishes between what she calls the conditioned self — the version of you that has been shaped by parental approval, social expectation, religious instruction, and the accumulated weight of what you were supposed to be — and the true self, which she calls the Knowing, a body-level sense of what is true and right that precedes and often contradicts what the conditioned self has learned to want. Most of Untamed is an account of how Doyle learned to access this Knowing and follow it — a process that required dismantling a life she had carefully constructed to be acceptable.
The love story that catalyses the memoir is rendered with genuine vulnerability. When Doyle fell in love with Abby Wambach at a point in her life when she was publicly celebrated as a Christian recovery writer in a Christian marriage, the conflict between the Knowing (this is real; this is who I am) and the conditioned self (this is not allowed; this will destroy everything I have built) was total. Untamed is, at its core, the account of how she resolved that conflict in favour of the Knowing — and what it cost and what it produced.
The short chapter structure and Doyle’s aphoristic prose style make the book highly quotable and easily shareable, which contributed to its cultural momentum. Individual chapters function as complete essays on specific questions — marriage, motherhood, religion, female friendship — and can be read independently of the larger narrative, making it a book that lends itself to rereading and returning to specific passages.
Why Untamed Is the Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Glennon Doyle, Untamed is the ideal first book because it is her most popular and celebrated work and the fullest expression of her distinctive gifts, the raw honesty, the emotional power, and the rallying call to women to live authentically and on their own terms. Untamed is Doyle’s memoir and manifesto about breaking free from the expectations imposed on women and learning to trust and live from one’s own truth, written with searing candor and emotional force. As an entry point it is ideal, for it is her best-known book and a powerful example of her honest, inspiring, and emotionally resonant writing. It welcomes the newcomer with its candor, its emotional power, and its empowering message, drawing the reader into her distinctive voice. It is her most famous work and the one that best represents her gifts, so the new reader encounters Doyle at her most characteristic. For the newcomer, then, Untamed is the natural and ideal starting point.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Untamed to be a raw, honest, and emotionally powerful memoir and manifesto. You can expect searing candor, for Doyle writes with unguarded honesty about her life, her marriage, her struggles, and her transformation. You can expect an empowering message, for the book is a call to women to break free from the expectations and roles imposed on them and to live authentically from their own truth. You can expect emotional power, for Doyle writes with intensity and feeling, and the book moves and galvanizes many readers. You can expect a structure of short, reflective, essay-like chapters built around stories and insights. You can expect themes of authenticity, motherhood, identity, love, and freedom. You can expect an intimate, rallying, and inspirational voice. Expect, in short, a raw, honest, and emotionally powerful memoir and manifesto, a galvanizing introduction to Doyle’s gifts.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Untamed has introduced you to Doyle’s voice, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore her other memoirs, which continue her raw honesty and her reflective, emotionally powerful storytelling about her own life and growth. Her earlier books trace earlier stages of her journey, including her writing on marriage, faith, motherhood, and the hard work of healing and becoming whole, each marked by the same candor and emotional force. Reading these after Untamed deepens your appreciation of Doyle’s distinctive gifts, the raw honesty, the emotional power, and the call to authentic living. Her characteristic voice runs through her work, and the reader moved by Untamed will find it across her books. Building your reading journey through Doyle is a matter of following her honest storytelling from Untamed into her earlier memoirs. The reader who begins here and continues will find one of the most candid and inspiring memoirists writing today.
Reading Glennon Doyle
Untamed is Doyle’s essential book. Love Warrior (2016) is the memoir that immediately precedes it — covering the marriage that Untamed ends — and provides context that enriches the later book.
For the full Glennon Doyle bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Glennon Doyle author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Glennon Doyle?
Untamed (2020) is Doyle's essential book — the memoir that spent over 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and became one of the defining personal development books of the early 2020s. Doyle was a blogger, activist, and bestselling author with a established public identity as a Christian recovery writer when she fell in love with soccer player Abby Wambach, left her marriage, and had to rebuild her understanding of herself from the foundations. Untamed is the book that resulted: part memoir, part manifesto, structured around the question of how to distinguish one's conditioned self — the performance of who we have been trained to be — from one's true self.
What is Untamed about?
Untamed is organised around three themes: the recognition of conditioning (the opening section, called 'Caged'), the experience of liberation (the middle section, 'Keys'), and the construction of an uncaged life (the final section, 'Free'). Doyle writes in short, punchy chapters that often function as standalone essays with complete emotional arcs. The specific narrative — leaving her marriage, coming out, falling in love with Wambach — is interwoven with Doyle's broader argument: that women in particular are trained from childhood to suppress their instincts and perform an acceptable version of themselves, and that recovery from this conditioning requires learning to hear and trust an inner voice that most of us have been trained to ignore.
Is Untamed a religious book?
Doyle's earlier books were more explicitly Christian, but Untamed is more broadly spiritual than denominationally Christian. She uses the language of faith and inner knowing rather than doctrinal Christianity, and the book has been widely read by people with very different religious orientations. The concept of 'the Knowing' — an inner voice or sense that she argues is more reliable than external authority — is presented in spiritual terms but is compatible with secular psychological frameworks as well. Readers who found her earlier Christian framing off-putting may find Untamed more accessible; readers who valued that framing may find it somewhat more diffuse.
What should I read after Untamed?
After Untamed, Glennon Doyle's earlier memoirs — Love Warrior (2016) and Carry On, Warrior (2013) — provide the context that Untamed builds on, and Love Warrior in particular covers the marriage that Untamed ends. Brené Brown's Daring Greatly covers the vulnerability and authenticity themes with more research grounding. Cheryl Strayed's Wild covers the physical journey as self-discovery with comparable narrative power. For readers interested in the gender conditioning argument specifically, bell hooks's All About Love and Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born address comparable territory with more theoretical depth.
