What is Untamed about?
Untamed is a memoir by Glennon Doyle, published on March 10, 2020. It tells the story of how Doyle — a Christian mommy blogger turned bestselling author, married with three children — fell in love with Olympic soccer player Abby Wambach, left her marriage, and rebuilt her life on her own terms. But Untamed is less a love story than a book about how women are conditioned to suppress their own desires, instincts, and identities in the service of social expectations, and what happens when a woman stops. Doyle uses her own story as a case study in what she calls becoming "untamed" — shedding the cages (her metaphor is a cheetah in a zoo) that culture builds around women, and learning to trust the inner voice she calls the "Knowing." Untamed debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and spent more than a year there, becoming one of the bestselling books of 2020. It was awarded Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir & Autobiography.
What genre is Untamed?
Untamed is a personal memoir — a first-person account of Doyle's life and transformation — but it is also a manifesto: a book that uses memoir as the vehicle for a sustained argument about how women live and how they might live differently. Its closest literary relatives are Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love (spiritual memoir structured around transformation) and Cheryl Strayed's Wild (physical and emotional journey as the occasion for self-discovery). Doyle is a more argumentative writer than either Gilbert or Strayed; Untamed moves between memoir passages and essayistic chapters in which she speaks directly to the reader, making explicit the argument that the memoir's narrative illustrates. The book was published during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have contributed to its outsized success — Doyle's themes of confinement and liberation resonated unusually strongly in 2020.
How long is Untamed?
Untamed summary
Glennon Doyle opens Untamed with a scene at a zoo: she and her children watch a cheetah chase a mechanical lure in a performance, and the zookeeper explains that this cheetah was born in captivity and has never experienced a real hunt. But the cheetah is still a cheetah — wild inside — even though it has lived its whole life in a cage and has learned, through training, to perform a neutered version of its own nature. Doyle takes this as her central metaphor: she is the cheetah. She has been trained since childhood to be a good girl, a good wife, a good Christian, a good mother — to perform a domesticated version of herself while the real self goes unacknowledged.
The book's first part traces the construction of Doyle's cage. She grew up in a Christian family with strong expectations about how a woman should live. In her teens she developed bulimia, alcoholism, and drug addiction — disorders she now understands as her body's response to the suppression of her own needs and desires. In her late twenties she got pregnant, married Craig Melton, got sober through Christianity, and built the successful platform (Momastery) and the successful life that looked, from the outside, exactly like what a good Christian woman was supposed to have.
The marriage was not a happy one. Craig had cheated on Glennon multiple times. They had been managing a fragile truce for years. And then, at a gala dinner in 2016, Glennon met Abby Wambach — a retired US Women's National Soccer Team player, an Olympic gold medalist, a World Cup champion — and felt, for the first time, what she calls the Knowing: an inner voice of certainty so clear that it demanded to be followed. She knew, immediately and without doubt, that Abby was the person she was supposed to be with.
The second and third parts of the book describe what followed: leaving her marriage, losing significant parts of her community and platform as the conservative Christian audience she had built responded with rejection, marrying Abby, and constructing a new life that she experienced as genuinely her own for the first time. Alongside this narrative, Doyle makes her argument: that women are conditioned from childhood to ignore their inner voices, to prioritize the comfort and expectations of others over their own desires and truths, and that the process of unlearning this conditioning is what she means by becoming untamed. The argument is explicitly feminist — she writes about martyred motherhood, women's anger, privilege, race — but it is rooted in her own specific experience rather than in theory.
How does Untamed end?
Key people in Untamed
Glennon Doyle — The author and narrator: a woman who built a life and a platform around a version of herself she no longer believes in, and who dismantles it in real time on the page.
Abby Wambach — Glennon's wife, whom she meets at a gala in 2016 and falls in love with immediately. A retired US soccer player and World Cup champion; the catalyst for Glennon's transformation, though Doyle is careful not to make Abby the cause of it.
Craig Melton — Glennon's first husband, with whom she had three children and a marriage defined by his infidelity and her loyalty to a version of herself she had outgrown.
Chase, Tish, and Amma — Glennon's three children, who appear throughout the book as the people she is most afraid of disappointing and most determined to raise into untamed selves.
The Knowing — Doyle's term for her inner voice of certainty: the gut-level sense of what is true that she had trained herself to suppress and that she is learning to trust.
Quotes from Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Glennon Doyle writes Untamed in a voice that is direct, declarative, and frequently aphoristic — sentences that read like they were written to be underlined.
"This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they've never been."
"When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself."
"I will not stay, not ever again — in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself."
Frequently asked questions
Is Untamed by Glennon Doyle a true story?
Yes. Untamed is a memoir — a first-person account of real events in Glennon Doyle's life. The book describes her marriage to Craig Melton, his infidelity, her decision to leave the marriage, her falling in love with Abby Wambach, their marriage, and the process of rebuilding her life and her sense of self. The people in the book — Abby, Craig, her children, her parents — are real, though Doyle writes from her own perspective and acknowledges that her account reflects her experience rather than a neutral record of events.
Who is Abby Wambach in Untamed?
Abby Wambach is a retired American soccer player, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and World Cup champion who is widely considered one of the greatest women's soccer players in history. She is Glennon Doyle's wife. In Untamed, Doyle describes meeting Wambach at a gala for Together Rising, Doyle's charity, in 2016 and feeling an immediate and overwhelming certainty that this was the person she was supposed to be with. Wambach appears throughout the book as a character — loving, direct, sometimes difficult — and Doyle is careful to portray her as a person rather than a symbol, noting that the transformation Untamed describes was her own work, not Abby's effect on her.
What is "the Knowing" in Untamed?
"The Knowing" is Glennon Doyle's term for the inner voice of certainty — the gut-level sense of what is true — that she had suppressed for most of her life in deference to external expectations and that she is learning to trust in the book. She describes the Knowing as a physical sensation: a stillness or a warmth or a sense of recognition that comes when she is about to make a decision that is genuinely aligned with who she is. The concept is central to the book's argument: that women are trained from childhood to distrust this inner voice, to override it with the voices of parents, partners, culture, and religion, and that learning to hear and follow it is what she means by becoming untamed.
What is the cheetah metaphor in Untamed?
Early in Untamed, Doyle and her children watch a cheetah at a zoo chase a mechanical lure — a performance designed to allow zoo visitors to see the cheetah run. The zookeeper explains that the cheetah was born in captivity and has been trained to perform this neutered version of its own nature. Doyle takes this as the book's central metaphor: she is a cheetah. She has been born into a culture that has built a cage around her through expectations of how a woman, a wife, a mother, and a Christian should behave, and she has learned to perform a domesticated version of herself within those constraints. The book is about her realization that she is still wild inside, and about her attempt to be what she actually is rather than what she has been trained to perform.
Why was Untamed so popular in 2020?
Untamed debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and spent more than a year there. Several factors contributed to its outsized success. The book was published in March 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its themes of confinement and liberation resonated unusually strongly with readers suddenly confined to their homes. Doyle already had a large and loyal audience from her earlier memoir Carry On, Warrior and her blog Momastery. And the book's explicit, declarative feminism — its argument that women deserve to live on their own terms — spoke to a cultural moment in which questions about women's autonomy were at the center of public conversation.
What other books are similar to Untamed?
Readers who respond to Untamed often also read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love (spiritual journey and self-discovery structured as memoir), Cheryl Strayed's Wild (physical journey and emotional recovery), and Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection (similar themes of authenticity and self-acceptance, in a more research-based register). For more Glennon Doyle, Carry On, Warrior (her first memoir, about motherhood and Christianity) and Love Warrior (about her marriage's crisis and its temporary recovery) provide the narrative context for Untamed. Rachel Held Evans's A Year of Biblical Womanhood is a related work about Christian women and gender expectations, from a writer who came from a similar background to Doyle's.
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