Book Review: Untamed by Glennon Doyle
(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Unleash My Inner Cheetah)
art by Jordan Watson, 8/12/2020. gouache
Like many people out there, I've spent the pandemic reading books. You remember books? The ones you'd hide under your math textbook and sneak a paragraph from while the teacher wasn't looking?
...Okay, maybe that part was just me. But I do know many others who have gone back to old favorites or used that time quarantined indoors to get back into a habit of reading.
And what a book I managed to grab here. Untamed is Glennon Doyle's hit book of 2020. It's a memoir, a short story collection, a self-help guide, and a critique of all the ways society views women, wrapped up into one powerful 352 page punch. Doyle manages to bring complex issues in feminism, mental health, and sexuality into a stark light with snapshots of her life. With her reflections on shampoo bottles, snowglobes, and soccer matches, Doyle masterfully presents how society molded and shaped her to become a bulimic daughter, to an alcoholic adolescent, to dutiful mother and wife, to finally, and most powerfully, herself.
My copy of Untamed is now thoroughly loved - borrowed and returned, highlighted, scribbled in, a few pages wrinkled from tears I couldn't stop from spilling. I saw her, I saw myself, I saw other people in my life. Doyle has a remarkable talent for metaphor, perhaps best illustrated by the opening story of a cheetah, bred in captivity, dreaming of the wild.
"Ah," the cheetah sighs, "I must just be crazy."
"You're not crazy," Doyle retorts. "You're a god damn cheetah."
And may we all find the wild we're dreaming of.