WHEN I PICKED up Get Untamed—a journal based on Glennon Doyle’s best-selling memoir Untamed—at a secondhand bookstore, I was, as the kids say, down bad. Real bad. A year of overscheduling, overcommitting, and underhydrating had turned me into the caretaker of a creative and existential abyss. In that bookstore, I was reaching for more than a how-to book. I was reaching for a lifeline. And I found one—just not in the way I expected.
Doyle emerged onto the nonfiction scene with Carry On, Warrior in 2013, followed by Love Warrior in 2016. The latter book was raw and vulnerable, detailing the dissolution and resurrection of Doyle’s first marriage. Acclaimed by Oprah, Brené Brown, and Elizabeth Gilbert, Love Warrior celebrated love’s ability to overcome all obstacles—from addiction to internalized misogyny—in a marriage. Then Doyle met retired professional soccer player Abby Wambach. Doyle and her husband divorced. Now Doyle and Wambach are, by all accounts, happily married. The events leading to this form the basis for Untamed.
I cannot speak to Untamed’s thematic specifics since I haven’t read it, but the Get Untamed journal is full of pithy advice about listening to one’s inner “knowing” and riding the waves of grief to transformation. The end goal is to free the self that has been suppressed by societal strictures and unwanted obligations. Exercises ask you to list times you’ve played small out of fear of disappointing others. It’s all very #girlpower 2021. One section, however, gave me pause. In a text block taken from the book, Doyle states that she is “not a good friend.” She “cannot remember birthdays,” does not “want to meet for coffee,” and “won’t text back.” Cue record scratch. How could a compassionate person say these things?
In my “What is going on with Glennon Doyle?” Google search, I stumbled across a podcast episode from two traditionalist evangelical pastors titled “Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Glennon Doyle.” The pair spend most of the episode subtly shaming Doyle for her “life choices” and ignoring the societal pressures that might lead a woman to ignore her husband’s infidelities and suppress her own sexuality. Society isn’t the source of our ills, they say: Sin is. Trusting the sinful self to show the way forward can only lead to a “dark place.”
I do not believe the self is always so untrustworthy. Yet, despite my disagreements, I found myself nodding many times as they spoke. It has always been my view that the self has limits, and that is why our lives are meant to be lived with others and in their service. Subsequently, the art we make comes to us from a place beyond ourselves. Ursula K. Le Guin, self-professed atheist, goes so far as to call it “the god” who visits us. This spirit wheels in and around our hearts, charting a course between the sacred and mundane. Most important, its voice doesn’t always sound like our own. Listening to myself, the self that craved recognition and feared missing opportunities, is how I ended up burned out and confused. However, in Doylean fashion, listening to that “still small voice” deeper within revealed that I was not lost, just exhausted. A few weeks of rest (and screaming into the void) put me back in touch with my creative spark. I suppose I did get untamed after all.
Faith-Marie Zamblé is an artist, writer, and M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. This is her final "Curated" column (for now).
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