Glennon Doyle shows how women are trained to be tame, and how listening to their inner Knowing, even when it costs them, leads to a freer and more honest life.
Untamed is a memoir and manifesto built on the image of a captive cheetah who accepts her small world as the whole world. Doyle argues that women are raised inside religious, cultural and family systems that teach them to chase artificial goals, stay agreeable and distrust their own instincts.
She tells her own story in short chapters: addiction and sobriety, a marriage that ended after infidelity, and falling in love with Abby Wambach. Each episode shows how she numbed herself, then learned to feel everything and act on what she calls the Knowing, the quiet inner voice beneath fear and conditioning.
The book then widens to parenting, friendship, faith, race and activism. Doyle questions inherited rules and beliefs, asks whose interests they serve, and urges readers to choose what they know over what they were taught, even when honesty means letting a false life burn.
Key ideas
1
Born wild, made tame
People begin free, but families, religions and cultures train women to be small, pleasing and obedient until the cage feels like home.
2
Feel everything
Feelings are data, not problems, and letting them rise and pass is the first step toward trusting yourself instead of numbing.
3
Trust the Knowing
A quiet inner voice beneath fear and advice can guide your choices, and honoring it matters more than pleasing others.
4
Question every rule
Ask whether a belief is true, whether it is yours, and whether it serves your becoming or someone else's comfort.
5
Honesty over false peace
Staying in a false life to protect others serves no one, and sometimes things must burn so truer lives can be built.
Chapter breakdown
8 chapters · 18 min
Summary by chapter
Untamed in 62 chapters, in our own words.
prologue: cheetah
Doyle opens at a zoo, where she watches a captive-bred cheetah named Tabitha run after a mechanical lure while a crowd cheers. The zookeeper explains that cheetahs in the wild are built for the hunt, yet this one has never known the wild. She performs on cue and is rewarded with meat afterwards. Doyle finds herself unsettled rather than entertained.
“
I watched Tabitha gnawing that steak in the zoo dirt and thought: Day after day this wild animal chases dirty pink bunnies down the well-worn, narrow path they cleared for her.
Glennon Doyle
She treats Tabitha as a metaphor for women. The cheetah is not chained; she has simply accepted her narrow world as the whole world. Doyle argues that women are likewise raised inside religious, cultural and family systems that train them to chase artificial goals and accept small rewards. The prologue sets up the book's idea that people are born wild and made tame, and that a freer life begins by recognising the lure.
Chapter 1
blow jobs
Doyle uses a provocative scene from her first marriage as her entry point: advice in a Christian women's magazine telling wives to perform oral sex on their husbands as a form of spiritual service. Her reaction mixes revulsion, dark humor and sudden clarity. She sees the advice as a concentrated example of how institutions package a woman's sexual obligation as virtue.
From that anecdote she widens the argument. Women, she says, are taught to treat their bodies as instruments for others' pleasure and their selflessness as a moral achievement, all delivered with the authority of divine law. She describes years of playing the good wife and good Christian woman until the performance hollowed her out, and she urges readers to ask whose interests a given rule really serves.
Chapter 2
polar bears
Doyle describes a polar bear pacing in a small zoo enclosure, repeating the same path endlessly, a behavior she links to zoochosis. The pacing is not madness, she argues, but a rational response to an environment too small for the creature's nature. She applies the image to women, whose restlessness, anxiety or depression she reads as a reasonable reaction to conditions too small for who they are.
She also explains how taming works: through slow reward and punishment, a person learns to suppress instincts in exchange for safety and approval, until she polices herself. Doyle says tame is not a compliment, and she asks readers to tell the difference between peace and suppression, and to question whether the behaviors they are praised for are really their own.
Chapter 3
tick marks
Doyle recounts a memory of a school vote in which students chose who would ascend to court, and her sense that she was there so the golden students could feel golden. Her friend Lisa read out the ballots while Doyle tallied the votes. The scene shows how early the sorting of children into the chosen and the overlooked happens, and how it can stick long after we know better.
“
Golden is decided early, and it sticks, somehow, even when we are grown and know so much better, so much more.
Glennon Doyle
She uses the memory to show how she learned to get through painful moments rather than feel them. She frames this as a survival strategy of a sensitive child rather than a character flaw, one that laid groundwork for later numbing. Doyle invites readers to recognize their own versions of this endurance and to treat them with compassion.
Chapter 4
algorithms
Doyle recounts a stretch of agonizing indecision about what to do with her life. She polled her friends, asked a school counselor, and finally turned to the internet, hoping strangers and bots might know what she should do. She could not even decide whether a new throw pillow should stay. Advice from others came with certainty, such as the claim that indecision harms children more than hard decisions do.
“
Finally, I turned to the World Wide Web to see if an invisible conglomeration of strangers, trolls, and bots knew what I should do with my one wild and precious life.
Glennon Doyle
She presents this as the result of an inner algorithm: a script absorbed from culture, family and religion that tells women to be agreeable, small and pleasing. Because it operates from inside, it feels like identity rather than conditioning. Doyle argues that recognizing the algorithm and seeing that it is not you is the first act of liberation.
Chapter 5
gatherings
Doyle watches a group of teenage girls gathered around a television, each glancing at the others' faces to find out whether she herself is hungry. The scene shows how girls learn to look outward for cues about what they want. Doyle, a mother hovering nearby, admits she finds it hard to leave them alone, and she knows teenagers think their moms are uncool.
“
Each looks to a friend's face to discover if she herself is hungry.
Glennon Doyle
She uses the moment to examine how women read the room and adjust themselves to the group, and how that habit makes honest connection difficult. Gatherings can look like community while really being stages for an acceptable version of womanhood. Doyle contrasts proximity with intimacy and suggests that real belonging needs honesty and the willingness to be known.
Chapter 6
rules
Doyle tells the story of Ashley, who attended a hot yoga class and found herself desperate to run for the door. The instructor said she would get very hot but could not leave the room. As the walls seemed to close in, Ashley stayed on her mat, then bolted into the hallway the moment the class ended. The story becomes a way to talk about rules we follow without choosing them.
Doyle argues that women absorb unspoken rules about how to look, speak and feel, and that these rules train them to distrust themselves. Breaking them is punished with labels like selfish or difficult. She calls for asking of each rule whether it is true, whether it is yours, and whether it serves your becoming or someone else's comfort.
Chapter 7
dragons
Doyle uses her friend Megan, five years sober after a decade of alcohol and drug abuse, to ask how addiction overtook such a strong woman. Megan married a man anyway because many people would have been disappointed if she had called it off. Doyle also describes a snow globe on her shelf, shaken up because dragons sit at our center, and the lengths we go to to keep it from settling.
“
We keep ourselves shaken up because there are dragons in our center.
Glennon Doyle
She argues that people numb themselves with food, drink, busyness and pleasantness to avoid their inner dragons: grief, shame, longing and fear. Her own addictions, she says, were coping mechanisms rather than flaws. The dragons, once faced, prove less lethal than they seemed, and recovery requires turning toward them and feeling what we most want to escape.
Chapter 8
arms
Doyle recalls arriving in a city to speak at a national book conference about her soon-to-be-released memoir, Love Warrior. At a dinner, a writer seated beside Abby asks where she is from, and Doyle realizes she has never felt so alive. A friend later suggests the connection between them felt as if they would have been together in another life.
“
I am excited to leave because I realize I have never in my life felt this alive, and now I just want to go out into the world and walk around feeling this alive.
Glennon Doyle
The chapter works as a short lyrical interlude about being held and seen. Doyle, who had long used busyness and caretaking to avoid stillness, finds that rest in another person's presence asks her to stop performing. She frames this kind of unconditional acceptance as the opposite of the walls she had built, and as the start of her life with Abby.
Chapter 9
Feel
Doyle begins her account of the Knowing with her sixth day of sobriety, when she attended her fifth recovery meeting. Embarrassed at how much she hurt, she tried to explain it to the circle, and she learned for the first time that all feelings are for feeling. Those people were the first she trusted with all of herself because they told the whole truth.
“
I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling.
Glennon Doyle
She argues that feelings are data rather than problems, and that culture teaches girls to numb or override them. Her first key is to feel it all, letting a feeling rise and pass like a wave rather than escaping it. She also notes the double bind that calls women too emotional while pressuring them to suppress emotion, a bind that keeps them doubting their own perceptions.
Chapter 10
Know
Doyle describes diving beneath the swirling surf of words, fear, expectations, conditioning and advice to feel for the Knowing, a quiet place beneath the noise where all is clear. She argues that every family, culture and religion uses ideas of right and wrong as cattle prods and sheepdogs to keep the masses in the herd, and that people are trained from childhood to distrust their inner voice.
“
I decided that if I kept doing the "right" thing, I would spend my life following someone else's directions instead of my own.
Glennon Doyle
She says her own years of numbing were ways of drowning that voice out. The Knowing, in her view, is felt rather than reasoned, and steadier than either logic or emotion. Fear is the main obstacle, because acting on what we already know can be costly. Doyle describes building a relationship with the Knowing, learning to trust it a little more over time.
Chapter 11
Let It Burn
Doyle describes the terror of realizing that living honestly would mean letting the life she had built burn: her marriage, her public identity as a redeemed woman, and her role as a devoted wife and mother. She does not romanticize the loss. Consequences for her children, reputation and livelihood were real. For a long time she contorted herself to follow old memos about how to become a successful woman and build a strong family and faith.
“
A whole family is one in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free.
Glennon Doyle
Her argument is that staying in a false life to avoid hurting others is not kindness. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to do what must be done. Doyle suggests that if the truth inside us can burn a belief, a structure or an institution, it should become ashes, because the alternative is a house already on fire.
Chapter 12
aches
Doyle introduces the Ache, a deep inner longing that most people are taught to numb or dismiss. She recalls that by the age of ten it had become her constant interrupter. In early sobriety she lived with sickness on several fronts at once: morning sickness, withdrawal sickness, and the sickness of living without a daily escape plan. She argues the ache is a compass rather than a symptom of ingratitude.
“
I don't know when I first discovered the Ache, but by the time I am ten years old, it has become my constant interrupter.
Glennon Doyle
She describes a moment inside the One Big Ache with her grandmother and mother, understanding she is there with everyone else who has welcomed a child, held a dying grandmother's hand or said goodbye to a great love. Longing, she says, signals the gap between the life we live and the one we are meant to live, and deserves curiosity instead of shame.
Chapter 13
ghosts
Doyle uses ghosts as a metaphor for unprocessed pain and inherited patterns that shape present behavior without our noticing. What we call personality, she argues, is often an old survival strategy hardened into habit. Families pass down emotional blueprints about which feelings are acceptable and which truths can be spoken, so haunting is both personal and collective, and women in particular carry the ghost of being taught to suppress themselves.
“
Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right.
Glennon Doyle
Her consoling message is that being human is hard not because you are doing it wrong but because you are doing it right. The way forward is to feel what was previously unfelt, since a ghost loses its power when faced. Doyle presents this as an ongoing practice of choosing presence over numbness rather than a one-time event.
Chapter 14
smiles
Doyle looks at the demand that women smile and perform happiness. She argues that the smile can be a tool of social control, keeping women palatable and making them prioritize onlookers' comfort over their own truth. She recalls years of smiling through pain and confusion until she lost touch with what she felt beneath it. In Paris she contemplates the Mona Lisa, whom she calls the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women.
“
Mona Lisa is the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women- women who feel and who know.
Glennon Doyle
She reads the painting's expression as that of a woman who has realized a dream yet still carries a lost one inside her. This echoes a woman who did not want the joy of a new baby to erase the pain of losing the first. Doyle concludes that real feeling, including the grief beside the joy, belongs on the face, and that refusing to smile on command is integrity.
Chapter 15
goals
Doyle critiques the self-improvement framework, arguing that the goals women are encouraged to chase, especially around weight and appearance, are often inherited from a culture that profits from their insecurity. She recounts her own history of disordered eating and body goals rooted in shame. She also describes becoming a do-gooder for the world, raising millions for people who were hurting, because a woman is not allowed to do well unless she also does good.
“
Being a good world saver wasn't enough to save my own world.
Glennon Doyle
None of it was enough to save her own world. She had assumed her pain meant she was not good enough yet and needed to try harder, but her husband's infidelity showed that being a good wife was not enough to hold a marriage together. Doyle urges readers to ask whose voice is behind each goal, fear or the Knowing.
Chapter 16
adam and keys
Doyle retells a story told by a man who, while filming a show, poked his head into Alicia Keys's dressing room. She had her back to him, leaning into the mirror to put on lipstick. The anecdote becomes a lens on how women are expected to be seen and judged for how they look, while their face, mind, soul, thoughts, dreams and struggles go unrecognized.
From there Doyle reflects on the invisible work and quiet rage that build when contributions are overlooked. She names a pattern in which women absorb frustration and perform gratitude because a good woman does not complain. Naming it is the point: what looks like a small irritation is part of a larger system, and keeping the peace can cost the self.
Chapter 17
ears
Doyle takes up inner listening. She argues that women are trained to prioritize others' voices over their own instincts, and that this silencing keeps them manageable. She says she does not want her children to become people who abandon themselves to please the crowd. Years earlier, while she was deciding whether to save or end her marriage, her daughters begged to get their ears pierced, an episode she uses to talk about courage.
“
Brave means, in every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.
Glennon Doyle
Bravery, she says, means turning inward in uncertain moments, feeling for the Knowing and speaking it aloud. She distinguishes the loud, anxious voice of fear from the quieter, steadier voice of the self, and says her inner knowing eventually told her things that upended her life. Honoring it, she argues, is the only path to real freedom.
Chapter 18
terms
Doyle describes the winter she was deeply in love for the first time and had told no one but her sister. Snow flurried outside while people inside a conference flurried about who was important enough to talk to. She smiled and stayed quiet, her strategy for getting through. She told a listener how she and Abby had met and how their emails and letters felt like blood transfusions.
“
I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.
Glennon Doyle
She reflects that she had lived most of her life on other people's terms, set by religion, culture, her husband and her own people-pleasing. She notes that women seem to almost die before giving themselves permission to live as they want. The chapter marks her growing sense that she has the right, and the responsibility, to set her own terms.
Chapter 19
erikas
Doyle profiles Erika, a friend who was a born artist but studied business because her mother, a corporate executive, wanted her to follow that path. Erika returned to the dorm each day and recovered from her business boredom by painting. Doyle also admits with humor that she has decided, once and for all, that someone texting her does not obligate her to respond, and that this explains why she has so few friends.
“
It's nearly impossible to blaze one's own path while following in someone else's foot-steps.
Glennon Doyle
She uses Erika to describe a friend who tells the truth rather than offering soft reassurance. Such friendship is rare because culture rewards women for being agreeable and built its structures around controlling women. It is nearly impossible to blaze your own path while following in someone else's footsteps, and a friend who refuses to co-sign your fear helps you find yours.
Chapter 20
beach houses
Doyle tells of a friend desperate to rent an expensive beach house even though she was deep in debt. She was looking at pictures of families at the shore on social media. Doyle uses this to show how we chase images of a good life, and how deep desires, like togetherness, can be met without abandoning the Knowing. Instead of renting, the friend bought a two-dollar basket and asked her husband and teenagers to put their phones in it for an hour each weeknight.
“
Instead of renting the beach house, my friend bought a two-dollar basket and placed it on a table in her foyer.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle applies the idea to her own marriage, a public story that had become a prison. She argues that staying in a false life to protect other people's hope serves no one. Sometimes things must burn so truer lives, families and nations can be rebuilt in their place.
Chapter 21
temperatures
Doyle explores how women learn to override their own signals. She describes talking endlessly, weighing every angle and arguing herself in circles while her body kept giving her information. She remembers a theme of sinking and dropping in her life, and then sharing all the reasons she could not stay in her marriage. A child told she is not cold, though she feels cold, learns early to doubt her own perception.
“
Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle now tells the women on her team that when she asks for an explanation she is not seeking justifications or opinions, only honest reads. She says her body knows things her mind talks her out of. Trusting that internal reading, she argues, is foundational before a woman can make true choices about relationships, work or identity.
Chapter 22
mirrors
Doyle watches her daughter look at herself in a mirror and then back at her, and uses the moment to think about the reflections others hold up to us. She recalls her middle school egg parenting project, in which students had to return an uncracked egg at the end of the week. She also admits there was a time she told herself she was staying in her marriage for her little girl.
“
I look at Tish and I think: I am staying in this marriage for my little girl.
Glennon Doyle
She says she had no point admitting what she knew, because she would never do what the Knowing would require. Doyle argues that discomfort with a reflection can mark accuracy, that self-awareness needs input from others, and that real intimacy rests on honesty rather than flattery. She adds that reflecting truth back to others requires care.
Chapter 23
eyes
Doyle looks into the bathroom mirror and has a reckoning with the woman there, an image she uses to say you must look dead into your own eyes, at your real self. She says that if mothers show their children that martyrdom is the highest form of love, children will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live.
“
I mean you need to look dead into your own eyes-at your real self.
Glennon Doyle
She also acknowledges the hurt she caused people she loved, calling it the worst of her life, and credits her ex-husband for giving their children permission to love Abby, the greatest gift he ever gave her. The chapter is about being truly seen, first by oneself and then by another, rather than being categorized by role.
Chapter 24
gardens
Doyle recalls how she learned to perform for men: the right panties, the arched back, the noises at the right time, and the highlighted hair, curled lashes and jeans that made her look right. She became a billboard for herself, and once a boy chose her, she knew what to do next. After she told Craig their marriage was over, Abby flew to LA to be honored at an awards show.
“
She was shaking and I was shaking, and we both, for a long while, stood there and breathed each other in and held each other and shook together.
Glennon Doyle
Before they ever touched, Abby had told her that if they ever got to, she would not let Doyle's eyes look away. When they finally met, both shaking, they stood breathing each other in. Doyle sets this against the performed self and uses gardening as an image of deliberately choosing what to cultivate in her life.
Chapter 25
vows
Doyle describes reading a note about a Hebrew word in scripture that signals the reader to stop and be still because the previous idea deserves deep thought. It may have cued a choir director to silence the choir and hold space between notes. She links this to her daughter Tish, who slows the family down and points when everyone rushes through life, pain and beauty.
“
It's believed to be a signal to the music director to silence the choir for a long moment, to hold space between notes.
Glennon Doyle
She reflects on the vows of her first marriage and argues that a promise made by an earlier, unconscious self cannot bind the person she has become. Ending the marriage was, for her, an act of honesty rather than failure. She notes how far she had come from the controlling first-time mother she used to be, and the vow she keeps most sacred is to herself.
Chapter 26
touch trees
Doyle borrows an idea from a survival expert: the best strategy for a lost person is to find a Touch Tree, one large recognizable tree that becomes home base. She can adventure into the woods as long as she returns to it. A lost person cannot stay in one place, though, because she must go out for food and supplies to survive.
“
A Touch Tree is one recognizable, strong, large tree that becomes the lost one's home base.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle says she has spent much of her life lost in the woods of pain, relationships, religion, career, service, success and failure. Her superpower, empathy, means she often cannot tell what is happening to others from what is happening to her. She asks readers to find their own Touch Tree, a steady anchor from which to venture out.
Chapter 27
buckets
Doyle imagines herself as a bucket of sea standing beside other buckets of sea, wishing all the achy separation might disappear if we were poured back together. She describes searching for herself in Abby, trying to blur the lines between them, laying their heads on one pillow and looking directly into each other's eyes. The longing to merge is both tender and a little desperate.
“
Wishing we could pour into each other, mix together somehow, so we're not so separate.
Glennon Doyle
The chapter circles the tension between wanting to pour into another person and remaining a separate self. Doyle is honest that she wished they could mix together so they would not feel so separate. The image carries her broader theme of love that does not erase its two people.
Chapter 28
memos
Doyle satirizes the memos about modern parenting, written in an ironic voice. In public, a mother is told to walk in front of her child and shield her from any unhappy faces that might make her sad and any happy faces that might make her feel left out. When she gets in trouble at school, the parent should explain loudly that her child does not make mistakes. The goal of parenting becomes never allowing anything difficult to happen to the child.
“
In short: Your life is over, and your new existence is about ensuring that her life never begins.
Glennon Doyle
The satire lands on the line that your life is over and your new existence is about ensuring hers never begins. Doyle contrasts this with the truth that people who do not suck are people who have failed, dusted themselves off and tried again. She wants readers to ask whether they chose their beliefs or were handed them.
Chapter 29
poems
Doyle tells of a son who once passed afternoons writing his own song lyrics, leaving little poems all over the house. Then he stopped drawing maps, reading and writing, and the poems stopped appearing. She understands that phones were designed to keep us addicted to exterior life, and that if we never dive inward, we never become who we were meant to be.
“
It's about how when we know what our children need, we don't pretend not to know.
Glennon Doyle
She admits she knew what she needed to do for him and was not doing it, and she says she is not doing right by him by letting the phone stay in his life. The chapter is about how, when we know what our children need, we do not get to pretend we don't know.
Chapter 30
boys
Doyle extends her cage metaphor to boys. She argues that children are either taught by the adults in their lives to see cages and resist them or trained by culture to surrender to them. She says that when we say girls are emotional and boys are stoic, we are sharing beliefs that have become mandates. Girls are shaped into small, quiet, pleasant people, and boys are taught that conquest and wealth matter most.
“
Children are either taught by the adults in their lives to see cages and resist them, or they are trained by our culture to surrender to them.
Glennon Doyle
The parts of themselves boys must hide, tenderness, empathy, humility and connection, are the slices of humanity that culture labels feminine. Doyle warns that boys who believe girls exist to validate them take rejection as an affront to their masculinity. She urges parents to help their sons see the cage rather than surrender to it.
Chapter 31
talks
Doyle offers advice she gives young women: every time you must choose between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your life is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself. She applies this to the talk she gives her daughters about media and the stories it tells about what it means to be a woman.
“
Either we leave our kids alone to make sense of them, or we wade in with them.
Glennon Doyle
She argues that harmful messages cannot be left behind because they are everywhere, so we either leave our kids alone to make sense of them or wade in with them. Magazines, she says, should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful and unique, in all kinds of bodies and hair. Doyle chooses to wade in.
Chapter 32
woods
Doyle talks with her children about pornography and the way it is marketed. She tells them that some people have taken sex, sucked all the life out of it, and packaged it for sale on the internet. The product gives a rush that feels like joy for a short while but becomes a killer of real joy, and over time people prefer the rush to the real thing.
“
We don't have to have answers for our children; we just have to be brave enough to trek into the woods and ask tough questions with them.
Glennon Doyle
She says her aim is not to scare them but to say that real sex, with humanity, vulnerability and love, is indescribably good, and that is why she wants them away from porn. She does not claim to have all the answers. Parents only need to be brave enough to trek into the woods with their children and ask tough questions together.
Chapter 33
cream cheeses
Doyle receives an email telling her it is her turn to provide breakfast for her kid's school athletic team after early-morning practice. A parent worries that others have not been providing enough cream cheese choices for the children, and suggests a nearby bagel store that makes five different flavors. Doyle reads this as a sign of a culture of parents eager to give children the best of everything.
“
We are cream cheese parents because we haven't stopped to ask: Does having the best of everything make the best people?
Glennon Doyle
She asks whether having the best of everything makes the best people. Her answer is blunt: five flavors of cream cheese is not how to make a child feel loved, and she says it is a way of raising entitled kids. The chapter pushes back on over-accommodation that mistakes abundance for love.
Chapter 34
bases
Doyle argues that tenderness grows from imagination. When people imagine themselves into another person's shoes, they see and feel what the other might feel. Imagination, she says, is the shortest distance between two people, two cultures, two ideologies, two experiences. She asks what if we decided it is strength, not weakness, to let other people's pain pierce us.
“
Imagination is the shortest distance between two people, two cultures, two ideologies, two experiences.
Glennon Doyle
She also describes her daughter Amma coming home after school, throwing down her book bag and saying again, and the work of her organization Together Rising. With a frequent donation of just 25 dollars, the group has moved more than 20 million dollars over the bridge from heartbreak to action. She adds that the most effective teams are often not the large well-known organizations people tend to give to.
Chapter 35
islands
One night Abby, who knows Doyle understands life through metaphors, asks her to think of their love as an island. They decided to build a life together first, and only then to share the relationship with children, parents, friends and the world. It is the kind of love novels are written about and people spend lifetimes trying to find.
“
One night, Abby, who knows I understand life best through metaphors, said this: "Glennon, I want us to think of our love as an island.
Glennon Doyle
Complications arrive when her mother, her best friend and champion, shows up on the other side of the moat carrying fear in both hands and asking them to lower the drawbridge. Doyle explains that she cannot keep going out to convince others that they are fine when she could instead be with Abby, being fine.
Chapter 36
boulders
Doyle uses a river image: love is a river, and impediments can stop its flow. Mental illness, addiction, shame, narcissism and fear passed down by religious and cultural institutions are boulders that interrupt love's flow. When a parent becomes healthy again, her child begins to feel her love.
“
Love is a river, and there are times when impediments stop the flow of love.
Glennon Doyle
She describes her own Removal, sobriety, which was both a spontaneous miracle and excruciatingly difficult work. When she put her newborn daughter down in a carrier, she forgot how to breathe, and she wondered how she could mother her daughter when she had never known mothering love. The chapter treats healing as clearing the path for love to reach children.
Chapter 37
bloodbaths
Doyle describes deciding how to tell her readers she had fallen in love with Abby. She had shared that she and Craig were divorcing but not that she was in love. She could reveal the relationship before she felt ready or stand in front of her readers and hide the most important thing in her life. So she decided to tell the world.
“
And my way of life is to dare to imagine the truest, most beautiful life, family, and world-and to then conjure up the courage to make real what I have imagined.
Glennon Doyle
She says her answer would be the same either way: she left her husband to build a life with Abby for the same reason she left booze to become a mother. She frames her way of life as daring to imagine the truest, most beautiful life, family and world, and conjuring the courage to make it real.
Chapter 38
racists
Doyle describes joining a task of planning an online webinar for white women, led by a Black leader, to call them into racial justice work. The mission was twofold: educate white women and raise donations to fund bail and respite for Black activists on the line daily. She holds that white women, accountable to and led by women of color, should use their platforms to call other white women in.
“
She will need to remind herself that being called a racist is actually not the worst thing.
Glennon Doyle
She says detoxing from racism means opening her eyes to the web of white supremacy that convinces her she is better than people of color. Beginning each day by reading Black and brown perspectives taught her that things were never fine. A white woman, she says, must remind herself that being called a racist is actually not the worst thing.
Chapter 39
questions
Doyle recounts a speaking event where a woman said she had followed Doyle's work for ten years and came to ask a question she was afraid to ask anyone else. Doyle thanked her for asking a question most are too afraid to admit they have. Then another hand rose, and another, until there was a sea of hands, some shaking, some in fists, a chain reaction of truth, hope and freedom.
“
Then another person's hand slowly rose and then another and another until there was a sea of hands, some shaking, some in fists-a chain reaction of truth, hope, freedom.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle suggests that many people live lives of quiet desperation, slowly suffocating as they hold their breath to fit inside. Maybe courage is not just refusing to be afraid of ourselves but refusing to be afraid of others, too. This is just life, and we are just people trying to figure each other out.
Chapter 40
permission slips
Doyle muses on what she shares with Abby: they understand each other so well because they are two women trying to free themselves from the same cages. She describes Abby as the crackling fireplace, the shag rug, the couch she sinks into and the jazz in the background. She loves the touches that are suggestions and the moment they lock eyes and decide.
“
What if I don't need your permission slip because I'm already free?
Glennon Doyle
She also pushes back on the idea that she was born a certain way, asking what if she wasn't born this way at all. She notes that we sometimes say things we believe are loving that actually reveal our conditioning. Her closing thought is a freeing question: what if I do not need your permission slip because I am already free.
Chapter 41
concessions
Doyle recalls watching a television show in which a teenage daughter was about to tell her parents she was queer. The show tried to be progressive, and the mother took her daughter's hand and said we love you no matter what. Doyle found herself whispering, don't say it, because the phrase still implies there is something that needs forgiving.
“
In other words: If my daughter told me she was gay, I would not love her in spite of it, I would love her because of it.
Glennon Doyle
She wondered whether the mother would have said it had the girl said she liked boys. If her daughter told her she'd robbed a bank, Doyle says, she would hold her hand and say she loves her no matter what. But if her daughter told her she was gay, she would not love her in spite of it but because of it.
Chapter 42
knots
Doyle writes a tender address to someone, likely a loved one, saying that when they were little their heart turned away from the church to protect itself. They held on to who they were born to be instead of contorting into who they were told to be. Now the person sits in the front pew and listens to Doyle talk about God and the hunches she has about her.
“
You held on to who you were born to be instead of contorting yourself into who they told you to be.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle is chatting before going out to speak to the waiting crowd. When they are done tonight, the two will go, and God will go with them. The way the person looks at her in this minister's office is new. The chapter is a short, intimate meditation on love that holds belief, faith and authenticity together.
Chapter 43
decals
Doyle argues that people should examine what they have been taught to believe, especially if they are going to choose beliefs that condemn others. She asks readers to imagine God as a vulnerable baby, born to a poor single mother, among the group most despised by the religious and political elite. The picture contrasts with the use of religious symbols as markers of group identity.
“
Everybody owes it to herself, to her people, to the world, to examine what she's been taught to believe, especially if she's going to choose beliefs that condemn others.
Glennon Doyle
She describes a memo in which being aligned with Jesus and having family values meant opposing abortion and gay people and voting for the matching candidate. She says the movement's face was pro-life and pro-family while its blood carried the racism and greed of a few. Most memos we live by were written by highly motivated men, and religious symbols can become shiny decals slapped on top of their interests.
Chapter 44
girl gods
Doyle takes on the idea of God as male. She holds that it is ridiculous to think of God as anything that could possibly be gendered. She argues that when girls are taught to pray to and model themselves after a God who looks nothing like them, they absorb a message about who holds authority, wisdom and holiness.
“
I think it's ridiculous to think of God as anything that could possibly be gendered.
Glennon Doyle
She suggests that every image of God is a human metaphor, and that consistent male images have reinforced male authority in families, churches and societies. Hearing God spoken of as She or Mother can produce a visceral recognition in women. Doyle encourages those who feel spiritually homeless to consider that their discomfort may be a reasonable response to a system that was not built to honor them.
Chapter 45
conflicts
Doyle thanks someone for understanding that loving her as yourself means wanting for her and her family every good thing you want for yourself and yours. She tells another person that what she was taught to believe about God, herself and others does not fit what she knows from her roots about love. Sometimes the voices inside us that we assume speak Truth are just the voices of human beings who told us what to believe.
“
When choosing between something you Know and something other people taught you to believe, choose what you Know.
Glennon Doyle
Many of those people meant well, and others only sought to control us. Her rule is plain: when choosing between something you Know and something other people taught you to believe, choose what you Know. One loved one told her she wants to be free to love her but is caged by her beliefs, which is where the conflict sits.
Chapter 46
streams
Doyle recalls reading that there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. She and her sister, surrounded by letters they had read for hours, looked at the pile and thought many of these people have more than enough. She asks why all these people who try so hard are still hurting so badly, and says now when someone struggles she first asks how she can help right now.
“
If we do not, we risk becoming codependent with power-saving the system's victims while the system collects the profits, then pats us on the head for our service.
Glennon Doyle
She warns that if we do not look upstream, we risk becoming codependent with power, saving the system's victims while the system collects the profits and pats us on the head for our service. Good art, she adds, comes from our desperate desire to breathe, to be seen and to be loved.
Chapter 47
lies
A short chapter about what it means to call something a family. Doyle recounts that she was told she left her family, and was corrected: what you had to leave was the thing that wasn't true so you could create your true family. The correction reframes her divorce as a move toward honesty rather than an abandonment.
“
Please don't ever let me hear you say 'I left my family' again.
Glennon Doyle
Doyle also remembers being asked to never say I left my family again. The lie she had absorbed was that leaving a structure meant betraying the people inside it, when what she left was a false arrangement. The chapter suggests that being told what our choices mean can help us stop believing a lie we told ourselves.
Chapter 48
deliveries
Doyle describes moments she calls deliveries, when new information arrives that is exactly what she needs to know about herself to take the next step with confidence and creativity. Before she paid close attention, she thought she was flip-flopping. Now she sees that if you are brave enough to accept a delivery and seek out the people doing the work you have been called to, you find your people.
“
When both people become unafraid and unpunished, that is a good good-bye.
Glennon Doyle
She also writes about what comes after betrayal. It cannot be striving, contorting or suffering to honor an arbitrary idea of right and wrong. She says her ex-husband did everything that could be asked of a person who has hurt someone, and that when both people become unafraid and unpunished, that is a good goodbye.
Chapter 49
invaders
Doyle writes frankly about depression and medication. She describes how she fades, getting low until she can no longer operate, though she can still do the dishes, take the kids to school and smile when it seems called for. She says she takes Lexapro and believes it, along with the personal growth work, is why she no longer self-medicates with boxes of wine and Oreos.
“
This kind of life is not easy, but it's often deep, true, meaningful, and beautiful.
Glennon Doyle
Her advice is simple: keep taking your damn meds, because after a while you will likely begin to feel better. She suggests that people living with depression often lead lives that are not easy but are deep, true, meaningful and beautiful. Perhaps this is why so many depressed people become artists, to reclaim the power of answering the question of what the point is.
Chapter 50
comfort zones
Doyle challenges the idea that comfort zones are comfortable. She recalls a time when a friend said that when Doyle talked about her pain and how hard life was, she felt comforted. Doyle realizes she has been conditioned to mistrust and dislike strong, confident, happy girls and women, and that she does not want to find comfort in the weakness and pain of other women.
“
But the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her.
Glennon Doyle
She notes the implicit cultural rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid and apologetic, and that the more powerful and happy a woman becomes, the less people like and trust her. For years she felt like pain was what she owed the world and staying sad was how she stayed safe. She asks readers to find genuine comfort, not the familiar numbness.
Chapter 51
elmer’s
Doyle watches her daughter play soccer and describes a pre-game ritual in which a teammate says she will call her Elmer's because the ball sticks to her like glue. She wanted to suggest her child move her body more, but she knows from experience that suggesting this to a child backfires. They also went for runs together, which never went smoothly.
“
I watch her walk away from me and toward this very, very hard thing and never in my life has my heart traveled so far up my throat.
Glennon Doyle
As her daughter walks away toward a very hard thing, Doyle feels her heart travel up her throat as never before. She notes that her daughter doesn't need to manufacture false drama in her social life because she has all the real drama, the thrill of victory and agony of defeat, on the pitch. The girls were soaked and freezing yet showed no sign of either.
Chapter 52
luckies
Doyle recalls the life she and Abby imagined before it existed. They each gave up everything for a one-in-a-million chance to build it together. On the phone from opposite coasts they told each other about the true and beautiful unseen order they felt pressing through their skin. One morning Abby wrote from the dock at sunrise, and the harder things became, the more often they returned to that imagined morning.
“
It is also true that we imagined this life before it existed and then we each gave up everything for the onein-a-million chance that we might be able to build it together.
Glennon Doyle
Now they sit on the dock, her back against Abby's chest, watching fish jump as the sky turns deeper purples. Their bulldog Honey snuggles on Amma's lap while Abby walks to the dock they call the Doyle Melton Wamdock. Doyle treats this as proof that the life they dreamed is real.
Chapter 53
buzzes
Doyle recalls feeling lonely, as if Abby had abandoned her and become normal without her. She remembers reminding herself that romantic love is just Disney nonsense, yet always feeling a yearning right before changing the channel. Abby, who is agnostic, feels something similar when watching a church choir in robes with deep voices and shiny eyes.
“
I look at that poem now, and I think: Glennon, you are always so desperate to find yourself and ready to abandon yourself.
Glennon Doyle
She also recalls feeling annoyed when someone suggested their love was chemical rather than personal. Looking at an old poem she wrote, she sees how desperate she always was to find herself and how ready to abandon herself. The chapter circles yearnings that point toward something true and ways she had learned to ignore them.
Chapter 54
sandcastles
Doyle argues that we build sandcastles and then try to live inside them, fearing the inevitable tide. She challenges the way we define ourselves by roles: mother, wife, sister, friend, career woman. If a woman defines herself as a wife, what happens if her partner leaves? If she defines herself as a career woman, what happens when the company folds?
“
To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: What do I love?
Glennon Doyle
She says the fact that we define ourselves by our roles is what keeps the world spinning. To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: what do I love? Doyle suggests that grief for lost structures is valid but that the self is the sand beneath rather than the castle.
Chapter 55
guitars
Doyle takes up the guitar, finding a teacher who offers lessons to high school kids in a tiny music store a couple miles from her house. It is hard, but it opens up another part of her, one that makes her feel more human. She notes that the more often she does things she wants to do, the less bitter she is at others for doing what they want.
“
The more often I do things I want to do, the less bitter I am at people for doing what they want to do.
Glennon Doyle
She imagines that if she can sing on stage, people will think that if she can do it, they can do anything. She recalls being put in goal by her brothers as a child and letting the pucks bounce off her. The chapter treats trying something new and awkward as a way back into the self.
Chapter 56
braids
Doyle watches a woman who braids her daughters' hair skillfully when they go to their father's house. The woman wraps her arms around the girls and plays with their hair, and Doyle sees in her the look of a girl who once knew what she was doing, with lots of friends who sat around braiding each other's hair and giggling. Doyle, by contrast, did not feel that.
“
Farther along, I saw Tish running alone, but I didn't slow down; I left her in my dust.
Glennon Doyle
She also recalls a run in which she saw Tish running alone and did not slow down, leaving her in her dust. Her knee started to hurt, but she did not slow for that either. The chapter sets her own speed, effort and distraction against the slow, tender work of caring for another person.
Chapter 57
seconds
Doyle looks back at how she tried to feel safe through control. When she was young, she made herself feel safer by controlling her food and body. Since life is scary and precarious, controlling the people she loves felt like the responsible thing to do. She admits that for a long while she led and controlled her people and called that love.
“
Maybe love is respecting what your people feel, trusting that they know, and believing that they have their own unseen order for their lives pressing through their own skin.
Glennon Doyle
Then she reconsiders. Maybe love is respecting what your people feel, trusting that they know, and believing they have their own unseen order for their lives pressing through their own skin. Maybe her role is not to imagine the truest, most beautiful life for them and push them toward it. She had believed she existed to make all their hopes and dreams come true.
Chapter 58
ideas
Doyle recalls a night when music played, the kids chased Honey around the family room and everyone sipped tea or wine and laughed until it hurt. In that setting she pulled Honey into her lap, turned toward Craig and said she wanted to tell him something. They had tried to stay together because it was the right thing to do and because they thought they should.
“
We tried, because it was the right thing to do, because we thought we should.
Glennon Doyle
She wonders what if they just live separately and raise the baby side by side. She admits her imagination became dangerous when she let it eclipse her Knowing. Some ideas, she suggests, wait as long as it takes for the snow to settle before they can be heard.
Chapter 59
sidelines
Doyle describes her blended family at a soccer field. After dinner they pack the car with chairs and snacks, and she and the kids sit on the sidelines to watch their dad and their bonus mom work together to score goals. They did not use a blueprint created by someone else and then struggle to fit each of them inside.
“
We did not use a blueprint created by someone else and then struggle to fit each of us inside.
Glennon Doyle
People who meet the family say wow in one tone or another because they haven't seen a family exactly like theirs. One day an older couple sat down next to Doyle and the kids, and the woman asked if the girls were her daughters. The chapter shows a family built deliberately and a new order of things being born.
Chapter 60
levels
Doyle recalls her search for whatever it is other people know that lets them cope and just live. She says the truth of her thirties was to stay on your mat, a lesson that echoes the hot yoga story told earlier. The next morning, on her way to the studio, she wondered why she left her body to live in her dangerous mind, and she admits she does not even want to visit her body, much less reside there.
“
I think this: The truth of my thirties was: Stay on your mat, Glennon.
Glennon Doyle
The chapter closes at a gathering where everyone listens to Ashley tell the story of staying in the hot yoga room until it made her sick. Doyle compares it to staying in her own pain and shame until she knew. Self-knowledge, she suggests, means staying present at deeper levels rather than fleeing.
epilogue: human
Doyle closes by returning to the cheetah and asking what it means to be fully human. She argues that women are trained from childhood to be good, obedient, self-sacrificing and palatable, a conditioning that separates them from their instincts and their Knowing. Being human, in her telling, is not a destination of freedom but a continuing practice of choosing honesty over comfort and courage over approval, again and again.
She reviews her own path of addiction, faith, marriage, divorce and falling in love with Abby Wambach, and acknowledges the costs: strained relationships, lost comfort, and the disapproval of people who preferred her compliant. Yet she insists the alternative is slow self-erasure. She speaks directly to readers, saying their restlessness and longing are signals from the self, and urges them to trust their own knowing instead of outsourcing it.
Who it’s for
Women who feel they have spent their lives pleasing others
Readers recovering from addiction, divorce or a major life change
Parents thinking about how to raise children free of old scripts
People questioning inherited religious or cultural beliefs
Fans of candid, lyrical memoir with a call to action
Glennon Doyle is an American writer and speaker who first became widely known through her blog and her memoir Love Warrior. Her work centres on honesty about addiction, motherhood, marriage, faith and the pressures placed on women.
Her earlier books include Carry On, Warrior and Love Warrior, which was a bestseller and an Oprah's Book Club selection. She also hosts a podcast called We Can Do Hard Things, which grew out of the conversations she has with her sister and with guests.
She founded Together Rising, a nonprofit that moves donations from supporters to people in crisis. She is married to Abby Wambach, the retired American soccer player, and they live together with their blended family.
Untamed is Glennon Doyle's memoir and call to live a freer life. Using the image of a captive cheetah, she argues that women are trained to accept small, artificial worlds. She tells how she learned to feel her feelings, trust her inner Knowing, and rebuild her life, including ending her marriage and falling in love with Abby Wambach.
What are the key takeaways from Untamed?
People are born wild and made tame by family, religion and culture, so it helps to question the rules you follow. Feelings are information to be felt rather than numbed. Trusting the inner Knowing, even when it costs you comfort or approval, is the path to a more honest life.
What is the Knowing in Untamed?
The Knowing is Doyle's name for a quiet inner place beneath fear, expectations and advice where things feel clear. She says it is felt rather than reasoned and steadier than logic or emotion. Fear is the main obstacle, because acting on it can be costly.
What does the cheetah represent?
The cheetah Tabitha, raised in captivity and chasing a mechanical lure, stands for women who accept a narrow world as the whole world. She is not chained; she simply has never known anything else. Doyle uses her to show how systems train women to chase artificial goals for small rewards.
Who should read Untamed?
It suits readers who feel they have spent their lives being agreeable, pleasing or self-sacrificing and want permission to live differently. It also speaks to people in recovery, those going through divorce, and parents. Readers who question religious or cultural messages may find it especially relevant.
What does Doyle mean by the Ache?
The Ache is a deep inner longing that most people are taught to numb or dismiss. Doyle says it began for her in childhood and argues that it works like a compass, not a sign of ingratitude. She encourages curiosity about it rather than shame.
What does Untamed say about addiction and numbing?
Doyle says she numbed herself with drink, food, busyness and pleasantness to avoid inner dragons such as grief, shame, longing and fear. She sees her addictions as coping mechanisms rather than flaws. Recovery, in her view, means turning toward those feelings and feeling them.
What does Untamed say about parenting?
Doyle argues that parents should help children see the cages culture builds rather than surrender to them. She satirizes overprotective parenting, talks with her children about media and pornography, and says that if we know what our kids need, we cannot pretend we do not. She also says mothers who model martyrdom teach children to live small.
Is Untamed a memoir or a self-help book?
It is both. The chapters are short personal stories about her addiction, marriage, divorce and relationship with Abby Wambach. Each story is used to make a larger argument and to invite readers to question their own conditioning.
What does Untamed say about religion and God?
Doyle urges readers to examine what they were taught to believe, especially beliefs that condemn others. She argues that picturing God as male reinforces male authority, and that religious symbols can become decals for the interests of powerful people. When what you know conflicts with what you were taught, she says to choose what you know.
Listen your way
SUN can turn this book into whatever format fits your day.
