I might be the only woman in America who read Untamed during this pandemic and didn’t love it. I read it in July, actually, but didn’t get around to writing about it until now because I just didn’t have much to say about it.
I didn’t hate it, exactly. It was okay. Nothing special, really. Everyone I follow on Instagram read it and fawned over it and posted quotes from it, so I expected it to be good. Instead, it was…fine.
It’s a series of essays about Glennon Doyle’s life. One was about her kids and watching how they develop ideas about food and their bodies as teenagers. If you’ve ever existed as a woman in the world, this resonates with you.
“Every single boy keeps his eyes on the TV and says, “YES!” The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial.”
It’s also nothing really new. If you’ve existed as a woman in the world, there has been some point in time where you felt self conscious about the amount of food you were eating, or the type of food you were eating. Yes, we would all be better off without this. It’s also so incredibly common that it doesn’t feel noteworthy at all.
“Diet culture promises us that controlling our appetite is the key to our worthiness, so we learn to not trust our own hunger.”
There were a lot of pieces that were not particularly interesting ideas, but worded in a way that made it feel more profound. The quote below isn’t anything revolutionary – attachment is the cause of suffering, basically. But it’s worded in a way that makes it seem like there’s something more going on.
“In my thirties, I learned that there is a type of pain in life that I want to feel. It’s the inevitable, excruciating, necessary pain of losing beautiful things: trust, dreams, health, animals, relationships, people. This kind of pain is the price of love, the cost of living a brave, openhearted life—and I’ll pay it.”
The quote below was the same kind of thing – people talk about this all the time when they talk about any kind of recovery. When they stopped drinking or using drugs, it did not fix their problems – instead, it revealed all the problems they had that they were trying to use drugs or alcohol to cope with.
“When I began recovery, I thought that my problem was that I ate, drank, and drugged too much. I learned that overeating, drinking, and drugging were actually not my problems; they were my ineffective solutions. My actual problems are clinical depression and anxiety.”
This book, as a whole, reminded me of Brene Brown’s work. However, Brene Brown’s work is based in research – it feels academic and actionable, whereas Untamed stays in this murky, messy emotional place that is not my cup of tea.
“We are all so fucked up and so magical. Life is so brutal and beautiful. Life is brutiful.”