Review: Untamed, Glennon Doyle

Glennon Doyle is on all the bestseller lists, she's been interviewed by Oprah and endorsed by juggernauts Elizabeth Gilbert and Brene Brown.

If you like their books, you'd like this one: Doyle's 2020 memoir about suddenly falling in love with, and leaving her marriage for, a woman – American soccer icon Abby Wambach, no less. This amounted to what, in many eyes, was a renunciation of the traditional Christian values and nuclear family life that the writer was already known for.

Doyle begins to trust her intuition when decisionmaking and advocate for all women to behave according to innate knowledge, even when it burns bridges. She believes women behaving nicely and safely, denying their own needs to prioritise those of their partners and children, is a driving factor behind the world's most intractable and threatening problems, including climate change, inequality and violence.

She espouses her views through public appearances and philanthropic action and the book, while telling her story, also takes the form – particularly in the second half – of answers to letters and questions from other women.

Her tale is riveting, her ideas intoxicating, and her tone evangelical, almost ringing. The style is both persuasive and powerful. I want to describe it as American, distinctly lacking the self-consciousness of British and Australian readers; yet her humour and sincerity save the book from being preachy or overpowering.

For the most part it is not a linear narrative. Its structure is loose and this is perhaps its biggest failing in that it lacks some signposts for readers as to where they are going and why, as memoir, question-answer and anecdotes mingle. This is a relatively minor criticism, however, and Doyle should take her place alongside Brene Brown and Elizabeth Gilbert in the shelves of all who wish to examine why people behave the way they do, and how this affects their own lives, those of their children and ultimately the societies in which we all live.

Its readability, empowering effect and its emphasis on the meanings and mechanisms of motherhood – not to mention its striking cover – would make it an excellent Mother's Day gift for the thinking Mum.