Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Audiobook, read October 2020

Untamed by Glennon Doyle is *very* outside my wheelhouse (that self-help-ish women empowerment kind of memoir), but it’s about a woman who fell in love with a woman and realized she had a great deal to unlearn and upheave in her life–how could I not give it a go?

Much of the book is fine, standard, poetic ruminations on unlearning and being true to yourself and remaining true to yourself in a society that benefits from your untruthfulness. If that sounds like your kind of book, I genuinely recommend this! But what I loved about it was every time she talked about her wife. I realized I was gay at age 27, 6 years into a relationship with a man, and when I fell in love with a woman it was like the whole world split open into something new and soft and hopeful and warm. Suddenly, I understood love songs and romantic movies and suddenly I knew what it felt like to crave someone and be craved in return. It was like this invisible wall had been separating me from the rest of what North American media told me life was like, and falling in love with my girlfriend brought that wall down. Suddenly, I understood. And my whole life changed.

When Doyle talks about her wife, it is with a joy and reverence and adoration that would have been alien to me a year ago, but which now melts my heart into a familiar warmth that seeps into my whole body and I can’t help but smile. I love straight love stories more now, too, because love is love and I know love now, and I love love. But queer love stories, especially between women, light my heart on fire, because I *know* what that magic feels like, and it is incomparably beautiful to see that magic out in the world, authentic and unapologetic and wild.