Untamed - Glennon Doyle

⭐ 8.0/10

(Originally written by KathleenQ)

"Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming.”

I like Glennon. She's an interesting person and writer. I've followed her online for years, and have read her past memoirs and really appreciated them. This one was supposed to be her best one yet.

It had its moments of intense beauty and wisdom, like in the passage quoted above, and they are the reason I rated this book as high as I did.

I appreciated her personal story, and wish the book could have spent more time on the narrative of her life. Instead, it was mostly a collection of short, disjointed essays with her personal stories sprinkled throughout. There is honestly not much in this book that you wouldn't already find in her Instagram and Facebook posts from the last three years.

Another thing that bothered me was how she confessed that her last book, Love Warrior, was kind of based on a lie she was telling herself about her own life at the time. I loved Love Warrior, and I hate that this book kind of cheapened the lessons learned in that book. It made me wonder how much of her current book, then, is based on truth, and whether she'll just be telling us five years down the road that this one wasn't fully true either.