Author Spotlight: Glennon Doyle

I’ve been on a Glennon Doyle kick this spring! I read Carry On, Warrior a long time ago, but after reading some interviews with her this spring, I went back and reread it, along with her follow-up Love Warrior. I’m just now finishing up Untamed, which was released in March, and thought it would be fun do a round up of her books. (Spoiler alert-if you haven’t read her first two books and want to be surprised by their endings, you’ll want read them before you read this post!)

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Glennon’s story, her books are a mix of essay and autobiography, originally drawn from her successful Christian mommy blog Momastery. To me, they’re memoirs slash self-help books, as she dives deep into her own struggles and experiences and invites the reader to see themselves in her problems and to grow along with her. Her memoir Love Warrior tells the story of her struggle with bulimia, alcohol addiction and variety of other addictions and issues from a young age, until she found out at 27 that she was unexpectedly pregnant. We follow her journey as she quits everything cold turkey and becomes a wife and mother, while still trying to work through the issues that led her to crave that numbness. 

In Carry On, Warrior, Glennon has now been married to Craig for years and they have three children, when he confesses that he has been unfaithful to her for a long time. After his revelation breaks apart the vision that she had of their stable family life together, she looks back through the cracks and issues in their relationship and struggles to determine what their relationship will look like in the future-can their marriage be repaired? Is it worth fixing? If she can fix it, does she want to? 

When Untamed begins, Glennon is at a book conference to promote Love Warrior. At this event to sell a book about how she repaired her marriage and salvaged her family, she falls in love at first sight with soccer player Abby Wambach. We follow her through her decision to end her marriage to Craig and her subsequent marriage to Abby. We’re also privy to her parenting struggles with her three children and her examination of her religions beliefs, racism, activism, and other social justice issues. Untamed is written in an essay style and is the most instructional of her books, as she takes the issues that she dealt with personally in her earlier books and she tries to apply the lessons that she learned from them to a more universal level.

For me, Glennon is most effective when she shows us a specific event in her life and then unpacks some of her own beliefs about that event and examines how she came to think that or feel that way. I find her big, messy, emotional personality to be so interesting, and I enjoyed reading all three of her books and following her journey from being a teenager who tried so hard to silence herself and to fit herself into a small, socially acceptable box to being “ a grown ass woman who does what she wants” working to fight injustice and encourage others to live their fullest lives. While there are definitely some aspects of her writing that are problematic, her fans love how she isn’t afraid to be complicated and make mistakes as she encourages her reader to do the same. Her desire to carefully examine her beliefs and assumptions about women’s roles in society, and to encourage herself and others to trust their own voices and not to be constrained by cultural norms, definitely made me think about the way that I parent my girls and what values I want to teach them. 

Here is one of my favorite quotes from Love Warrior:

“You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it's hard. Not because you're doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don't avoid the pain. You need it. It's meant for you. Be still with it, let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you'll burn to get your work done on this earth.”