book review of the untamed

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New York Times Bestseller

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by Glennon Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2020

Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.

More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.

In her third book, Doyle ( Love Warrior , 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.

Pub Date: March 10, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Dial Books

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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SEEN & HEARD

A Naked Chelsea Handler Wants You To Read Books

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Jon Krakauer

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Is Glennon Doyle’s new memoir ‘Untamed’ inspirational or heavy-handed?

Book review.

Glennon Doyle’s “ Untamed ” opens with a story about a cheetah. While Doyle is at the zoo with her wife and kids, the family watches a “Cheetah Run” in which a cheetah chases a stuffed pink bunny attached to the back of a Jeep. After the run, Doyle’s young daughter notices the cheetah stalking the perimeter of her cage and says, “Mommy. She turned wild again.”

It’s a metaphor for the ways women are tamed from birth by patriarchy. In “Untamed,” Doyle writes about the ways in which she was caged by internalized misogyny, religious doctrine and homophobia, an eating disorder that started in her early adolescence, alcoholism and what became a performative marriage. She also shares stories of many people who have written to her with their own struggles against being caged. “All of the things that make a woman human are a good girl’s dirty secret,” Doyle writes.

However, many stories end too neatly, with heavy-handed messages of inner power and freedom. Freedom is an important concept in this memoir, but the language of freedom and liberation has larger connotations outside of white women’s experience of patriarchy.

Agency is essential in “Untamed” — the ability to trust oneself is, according to Doyle, the key to so-called freedom. But there are things individuals can do and things they can’t, often based on outside constraints. Doyle swings between recognizing this and insisting that women have everything they need inside them. Often overusing the words “power,” “freedom,” “Knowing” and “Self,” “Untamed” reads like a self-help book for wealthy white women. When it treads lightly into the complex territories of race, privilege, misogyny and capitalism, it boomerangs back to the tired language of every affirmation book ever written: “I am fireproof,” “Life is brutiful ,” “To be brave is to forsake all others to be true to yourself.”

“Being human is not hard because you’re doing it wrong, it’s hard because you’re doing it right,” Doyle writes. This contradicts an attempt at complexity with the binary language of “right” and “wrong.” The book sags with one-liners and clichés like this. After a while, the platitudes and pseudo-empowering statements begin to blend together and sound the same.

Where the book manages to be unique and interesting is in the tension between Doyle’s Christian identity and her marriage to a woman.

Doyle made a name for herself with “Love Warrior,” which — as she writes in “Untamed” — was a misguided story of marital redemption. It came from trying to fulfill outward expectations: that a Christian wife could forgive her husband for infidelity and work to create a healing family; it was misguided not because this can’t be done, but because in Doyle’s case, it actively covered up her desire to be with a woman, U.S. soccer icon Abby Wambach.

Doyle recounts in “Untamed” falling for Wambach in a fairy-tale meet-cute that’s pretty endearing, and this reviewer will never scoff at a love story between two women, no matter how cheesy. But the “Love Warrior” story that Doyle shed for this slightly queerer love story falls into the same trappings of the first: everything tied in a neat little bow, even the hard bits.

Where “Untamed” gets even more interesting is in its position in the broader discussion about what it means to be queer, and how queerness as an ethos manifests or doesn’t.

While Doyle is now in a lesbian relationship, the book’s narratives of marriage and parenting are very traditional. This isn’t right or wrong, but it doesn’t disrupt cis-hetero patriarchal dynamics either. Marriage equality has long been criticized by queer activists as too mainstream of a fight; it ignores other ways of making family, erases conversation about gender outside the binary and falls into step with an institution many folks argue is rooted entirely in power dynamics based on gender and sexuality.

“Untamed” does not bring a queer ethos to its storytelling, but rather happens to have a lesbian relationship in a narrative that has “Lean In” vibes — that is, general, oversimplified advice about finding and cultivating inner power that only works for a certain subset of the population.

“ Untamed ” by Glennon Doyle, The Dial Press, 352 pp., $28

Doyle was scheduled to speak about “Untamed” on March 17 at The Moore Theater but the event has been postponed due to coronavirus concerns . Check stgpresents.org for updates.