My beef with Glennon Doyle

She's got a real fetish for pain.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been a fan of self-help books, and I am even less enamored with the cultish appeal their authors can have on an audience. Whenever a new figure comes on the literary scene promising outcomes, my skepticism is activated. Some words that trigger my bullshit radar are ‘manifest’, ‘promise’, and ‘real’. Perhaps it comes as no surprise to learn that Glennon Doyle uses the word ‘real’ no less than 129 times in the somehow scant 352 pages of ‘Untamed’, her third (yes, third) memoir in only seven years.

Some background for the uninitiated:

Glennon Doyle rose to fame as a particularly charismatic incarnation of the ‘Christian Mommy Blogger’ archetype, running a potently successful blog that was mostly about motherhood and family entitled ‘Momastery’. She then wrote a couple of standard fare self-help books styled as memoirs, one of which was about forgiving her husband after infidelity, and she quickly shot up the bestseller list. Then Doyle shocked her main audience of doting, CCD-teaching, pie-toting, heterosexual stay-at-home moms by divorcing her husband for a famous former soccer player (Abby Wambach) and choosing to co-parent her three children with him, Gwyneth and Chris style. ‘Untamed’ is the much hyped post-divorce book.

On the header of Momastery (now very professional looking, with links to buy Doyle’s books, purchase tickets to her public speaking events, and visit the spin-off website for her non-profit organization, ‘Together Rising’) there’s a section called ‘Classics’, or in other words, viral posts. The first one is entitled ‘First the Pain, Then the Rising’.

This attitude of “first-the-pain” is at the core of my major issue with Doyle. She’s far from the first person to create an alt-religion or life approach based on some kind of pain endurance. The Wim Hof Method comes to mind, with it’s promise of increased focus and physical peak performance if one can merely learn to withstand being submerged in single-digit temperatures regularly. The millions of elective Medspa cosmetic procedures Americans now undergo in a typical year in pursuit of what Jia Tolentino coined ‘Instagram face’ are starting to take on a martyr-like quality. Workouts so intense they frequently lead to injury are another example. Diet culture (something Doyle purports to stand against, having recovered from bulimia herself as a young adult) has been using this framing to motivate potential customers since the beginning of time. No pain, no gain. Sweat now, smile later. I’d rather be sore than be sorry. Doyle takes this somewhat stale approach and instead applies it to emotional pain. Emotional pain is her bread and butter.

Glennon Doyle @GlennonDoyle

No more. Enough of that. Let’s live so that when we hear our own voice, when we catch a glimpse of ourself, we can finally say: Ah. There She Is. Love you. G #GetUntamed

I cannot overstate how many passages of Untamed are about the fruits of emotional pain. In Doyle’s world, every break-up is really an opportunity in disguise, the pain of disappointing the people you love instead of yourself is always worth it, and you always know what is right for you, deep down. If you can’t find the answer, you’re just not listening hard enough. If you know what you need, but it is something you can’t have because of material blockages (like money, resources, or privilege), Doyle doesn’t have a whole lot of advice to offer.

Doyle loves writing impactful Statements. Like. This. It is almost like she doesn’t trust her readers to be able to take in a whole sentence at once. The reason I generally don’t like books like Untamed is that I don’t relate to generalizations or platitudes, but ultimately the emptiness of her writing style isn’t what bothers me. What bothers me is the way she has transmuted a traditional, problematic Christian emphasis on suffering into a sort of navel gazing activity for a more secular, socially progressive set. It’s quite a bit of the medicine she claims to have stopped swallowing. 

In one segment of Untamed, Doyle talks about a conflict with her partner, Abby. Essentially, the conflict is that Abby can relax around the house without guilt about what she should be doing, and Doyle can’t. Doyle writes:

That’s when I stopped looking at Abby and thinking: What is my

anger telling me about her? And started asking: What is my anger

telling me about me? My anger was delivering a package with one of

my root beliefs in it—a belief that was programmed into me during

childhood: Resting is laziness, and laziness is disrespect. Worthiness

and goodness are earned with hustle.

This paragraph encapsulates what is hypocritical about Doyle’s message. The last sentence here that she is ‘rejecting’ is exactly her attitude towards self-improvement, except now the hustle is defined as listening to your own feelings above all else and being ruthlessly loyal to them. I am not a mental health professional, but I have been in therapy for seven years, and one of the first things I learned there was that feelings you experience should not be interpreted as divine truths delivered from on high.

Doyle’s capitalizing (let us not forget for one moment that Untamed is a huge monetary success for her) on this tendency towards self-flagellation gives me shades of Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, who also made millions by pointing at herself instead of towards established Black anti-racism authors as resources for self-education. Instead of dissecting the norms of modern racism through a white lens, Doyle has taken many of the same norms of the Christian culture she outgrew and repackaged them as a story of self-actualization. 

In the case of Untamed, relentless “self-improvement” and “radical self-honesty” are just another expectation to place on women already being crushed by economic inequality, childcare responsibilities, and unsatisfying marriages. It posits that if women cannot find the courage to listen to their inner voices, they should expect to be miserable. It’s a brazenly unoriginal ‘get up off the couch and get moving’ approach to mental health that stays remarkably shallow and unpractical throughout. Reading the book during the late stages of New York City’s quarantine was like receiving dispatches from another planet all together.

Doyle remarks often throughout Untamed that the voices we hear in our heads telling us what decisions we should make about our lives don’t really come from us, they come from our family and friends, our bosses, the people we don’t want to let down. She encourages everyone to listen solely to their inner voice. To her impressionable readers, the author’s voice might end up being far louder than their own.

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Anyway, this was my favorite part of the book (yes, she is quoting herself):

“I was born a little broken, with an extra dose of sensitivity.

—SOME HORSESHIT I WROTE ABOUT MYSELF IN MY FIRST MEMOIR”

To me, Untamed smells like more of the same.