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Untamed

Genre: Memoir / Personal Development

Book Type: Audio

Author & Narrator: Glennon Doyle

Pages / Length: 352 pages / 8 hours and 22 minutes

Publisher: The Dial Press; Later Printing edition (March 10, 2020) / Random House Audio

Book Description:

This is how you find yourself. There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this?We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves.


For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.


Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.


Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.


Ok, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book nearly as much as I did, but holy moly, I see why so many women love this book!!! What made it even better was doing the audio and hearing her read it herself (which adds such a layer for me that I find I can’t stop listening to authors read their own books).


Favorite Quotes:

To shine a light on the beauty of her words, I tried to narrow down some of the passages that spoke the loudest to me.


🐆 We are alive only to the degree in which we are willing to be annihilated. Our next life will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just work, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.


🐆 What is better: uncomfortable truth or comfortable lies? Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.


🐆 Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life is to disappoint as many people as necessary in order to avoid disappointing yourself.


🐆 A boundary is the edge of one of our route beliefs about ourselves and the world.


🐆 What is it that affects you so deeply that whenever you encounter it you feel the need to look away? Look there. Where is the pain in the world that you just cannot stand? Stand there. The thing that breaks your heart is the very thing you were born to help heal. Every world changer begins with a broken heart.


There were so many moving parts of this book that it was an extremely easy and quick read/audio. I’m learning the hardest part for reading any memoir/biography is that I like them to be somewhat linear, and this was not! This is completely a personal preference, but that is hard for me to follow where she’s at with her personal growth. Overall a great read and highly recommend!!!


Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

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