Editors Reads Verdict
Untamed is a memoir-as-manifesto that captured a specific cultural moment with remarkable precision — Doyle's aphoristic prose and uncompromising stance on self-determination resonated enormously with women who felt constrained by expectations they hadn't chosen.
What We Loved
- Doyle's aphoristic, punchy prose is distinctive and immediately quotable
- The love story at the book's center is told with genuine vulnerability
- Captures the specific experience of social conditioning and its undoing
- Many chapters work as standalone essays with complete emotional arcs
Minor Drawbacks
- The manifesto tone can feel prescriptive rather than invitational
- Doyle's framework for authenticity is not universally applicable
- Some repetition across the three-part structure
Key Takeaways
- → The version of yourself you perform for approval is not your real self
- → Conditioning begins so early that dismantling it requires active, ongoing effort
- → The question is not what you should do but what you actually want
- → Relationships built on a false version of you cannot sustain your real life
- → Trusting your own knowing is more difficult and more important than following rules
| Author | Glennon Doyle |
|---|---|
| Publisher | The Dial Press |
| Pages | 352 |
| Published | March 10, 2020 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir, Self-Help |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Women questioning the expectations imposed on them by family, religion, or culture, and anyone interested in memoirs about radical self-reinvention. |
The Cheetah and the Cage
Untamed opens with a scene at a zoo: a cheetah named Tabitha pacing her enclosure, trained since birth to perform tricks for crowds, having never run at full speed. Doyle uses Tabitha as her central metaphor: women are conditioned so young, so thoroughly, that they mistake the cage for their nature.
The inciting incident of Doyle’s memoir is meeting soccer star Abby Wambach at a book event — Doyle was then married to her son’s father, a man she loved but had settled into rather than chosen with full consciousness. The meeting detonated something. The memoir is the account of the detonation and what she built in its aftermath.
The Power of the Moment
Untamed was published in March 2020, went immediately to the top of the bestseller lists, and stayed there — propelled in part by the pandemic-induced circumstances that left millions of women at home with time to read and a renewed sense of the lives they were actually living. The book’s message — stop performing the self that others need you to be and start living from your own knowing — landed with particular force at a moment of enforced stillness.
Doyle’s prose style is unlike most memoirists: she writes in short, aphoristic bursts, chapters that sometimes run two pages, sentences built for Instagram shareability. Critics sometimes mistake this for shallowness. In fact, it’s a deliberate rhetorical strategy: Doyle wants her ideas to be portable, to travel with readers out of the book and into their daily lives.
The Limits of the Framework
Untamed works best as a memoir and struggles when it operates as a universal prescription. Doyle’s specific experiences — recovering from addiction, leaving a marriage, coming out, building a new family — generated the insight she shares. But that insight doesn’t always scale to lives organized around different constraints.
The book is also unapologetically binary in some of its framing: there’s a way that feels right (trusting your inner knowing) and a way that doesn’t (living for external approval). The reality of moral decision-making is messier than that. Readers who need nuance may find the framework too clean.
What It Gets Right
At its best, Untamed is a book about the specific, underacknowledged labor of becoming yourself — of noticing the ways you perform compliance, tracing their origins, and deciding which of them to keep. That project is genuinely valuable, and Doyle’s vulnerability in documenting her own version of it makes the book worth the arguments it sometimes provokes.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — A culturally resonant memoir-manifesto whose aphoristic honesty and genuine vulnerability about self-reinvention made it essential reading for millions.
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