Untamed

And the first time I interviewed you for your incredible book, Untamed.

This episode was inspired by a conversation I was having recently with Glennon Doyle. So the author of Untamed and Love Warrior.

author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Untamed, which has been at the top of every bestseller list since its publication on March 10th, and is also Reese Witherspoon's book club selection.

And then wrote a book Untamed about meeting Abby and it's just a crazy and beautiful love story.

I also bought Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I read it. Did it change your life? I didn't finish it. When I had a boyfriend I was like, I guess I should practice reading.

I read Untamed during the pandemic and I didn't know your work before that.

And it felt incredibly aligned to me.

And it felt like everything was meeting with you and with Abby, the balance of your relationship and the humor. I just related to it so much.

I think that I want to tell that story, the not story that's in Untamed.

I just go, oh my, I've never seen her do this before in our life together.

Then 6 a.m. comes around, I'm always the first one up. Abby's rolling out of bed with your book. I said, what are you doing up? She said, I can't stop. I cannot stop.

I'm telling you when I picked this book up, I cried, I laughed, I cringed and I could not put this book down.

And we were talking about this ridiculous situation we find ourselves in parenting where we are still human beings who have needs, but like suddenly no one cares.

And Bernay was talking about this situation where she had just come home from this long business trip.

I'm gonna have to go read the book again I'm gonna go read that again it's you untamed again because untamed I mentioned it in my acknowledge section do you think I don't you think I don't know that my friends have sent it my friends who get the arcs of the books I had it's a very exciting happening in my life that you put and him to the acknowledgements and then watch me I sat in my truck like when I still had to be a little bit in hiding and couldn't go inside a basketball game but I could take my kid to a basketball game so I would just sit in the car and I listened to it in the car and then when we had to drive I was like I have to get home so I can start listening again I was so caught up it was so good it was so good

And you wrote about this in Untamed.

I'm like halfway through your boundaries, podcast, the latest one, and you were discussing boundaries for married people.

The writer of Untamed was like anorexic the whole time I wrote it.

I think what I did is what I wish for other people to do, which is that I wrote the truest, most beautiful self I could imagine.

And the refrain of Untamed is you're not crazy. You're a goddamn cheetah.

It's the same person who would say she wrote Love Warrior and then left her husband.

And you go through the Untamed process and you're peeling back and you take that brave next step and the next step appears and you either tell yourself, oh, I'm not going to take that because then that will give someone ammunition against me.

She picked up a copy of untamed. I had it before all this stuff went down and I read it and I got lost in it.

This deserves all the praise that it gets. And I was just so proud of your relentless honesty that it did a lot for me and it gave me sort of the fortitude to sort of get through the worst of times.

I wrote this book called Untamed and the... Yes, I know it well.

the kind of parable story that I opened Untamed with was about a cheetah who was running back and forth on this ridiculous performance for the crowd because the cheetah had been raised with a black lab to learn how to be a lab, not a cheetah.

I wrote this book called Untamed and the...

the kind of parable story that I opened Untamed with was about a cheetah who was running back and forth on this ridiculous performance for the crowd because the cheetah had been raised with a black lab to learn how to be a lab, not a cheetah.

the thesis statement of Untamed was I'm not crazy, I'm a goddamn cheetah because I think a lot about growing up as a woman is about rejecting the idea that there was ever anything wrong with you.

I do wonder if I were not in a gaslighting tango with the world, would my thesis statement of untamed have been, I'm not crazy, I'm a goddam cheetah.

And it reminds me of the thing I wrote about in Untamed with the touch tree.

The writer of Untamed was like anorexic the whole time I wrote it.

It's the same person who would say she wrote Love Warrior and then left her husband.

Because it's the same person who would say she wrote Love Warrior and then left her husband. Of course, when you get to the path of the Love Warrior and you understand the next step is that you do it because it's the thing you need to do.

And the refrain of Untamed is you're not crazy. You're a goddamn cheetah.

And I think what I did is what I wish for other people to do, which is that I wrote the truest, most beautiful self I could imagine.

And those early writings have turned into three books, the last of which was Untamed.

I watched from my home this past year in awe as Untamed became one of the biggest books of 2020 and 21.

This song has already become a personal anthem for me, and it's helped me through many hard days. And I hope it will become our family's pod squad anthem too.

Like this hot yoga. And I was like, no matter what happens in here, I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay. I'm melting, but I'm going to stay on this damn mat.

I lived in New York for two years and I literally left because I was reading Untamed.

I think that part of this has to do with, I have gotten male privilege because of the way I present through my life and because of sports. So I have a sense of male privilege that maybe you both because the way you present and the way that you've been received in the world, it just might be slightly different. So that's interesting. Yeah, I think that that's kind of interesting. So you obviously played the iconic role of Elle Woods.

So you obviously played the iconic role of Elle Woods. And because everyone, I mean, everybody knows Elle Woods, but because of Elle's beauty and popularity and femininity- From Legally Blonde, just to- Right, from Legally Blonde. She was constantly assumed to be not smart enough, not serious enough, not powerful enough to be at the table she earned her way to.

Well, I don't think women or any women are actually too much or not enough. I just think that's the structure we're given. Exactly. Please say that again. No woman is too much or not enough.

Why are we told that? Like, that was untamed for me was this unlocking of all of the constructs that don't hold water for me anymore. This idea of the perfect woman or the perfect, yet showing up in society with everything that is weighing down on us, it's just crushing.

I don't know if you wrote the full story about this in Untamed, but do you want to tell the first bit of the story where you called?

Well, I'll tell you. You called me. Oh, the blowjobs.

Untamed is like letting loose.

And I think switching into, I rather experience everything than miss everything, right? Is that feeling that is related to our defenses. Our defenses are our idealization, our denial, our repression, right? What do we do internally? Projection.

Stuff I wrote in Untamed that doesn't exactly feel right anymore. And lots of it's about gender and sexuality.

It was something like you gave a litany of things that might possibly be going on in our lives that were really hard to say. They were embarrassing or they were hard or they were sad or they were shocking and they were carrying these things around, but we were not saying them out loud.

And one of my things was embedded right in the middle of the list.

And I had your book open and I just kind of like very quietly, I closed it and I set it down and I sat there quietly for about one minute and I picked up my phone and I texted you. And I said, something's wrong in my marriage.

And I have a whole chapter in Untamed where I would say she's pearl.

In Untamed I call it, the truer, more beautiful world.

If you understood that metaphor in the book, you might be bittersweet.

My wife had just read, um, Love Warrior and Untamed and she was talking about you all the time.

You were the person that wrote Untamed.

And in Untamed, I write woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, women, women, like all the time.

And now when I listen to things, I'm starting to think differently about it because I'm thinking, oh, if you, like a TERF, if I'm a TERF, if your most important thing is protecting your idea of what a woman is, then that's an over-identification with an identity.

I do remember spending a lot of time talking about having untamed myself in many, many ways in terms of sexuality and our family and marriage and gender stuff even.

And so it was before COVID hit. And oftentimes before you go on the book tour, there's a huge to do, you know, like your whole team has planned an entire for a whole year, this book tour, you have a whole situation of clothes and so stage and you are about to go talk about this, this, this art that you've just created.

It's now going to go out into the world.

So when we talk about getting weird or getting weird again, I just want to, to talk about all of the context that was an is a part of those times when you start getting like, we talk weird, but like you start to obsess, I think a little bit about your body.

You are literally turning your insides out and letting people read your insides.

I have been working really hard with a few amazing people to take the magic and the fire and the love in the Untamed book and turn it into a TV show to come into your living rooms.

Untamed is on the surface, a sexy, funny, modern classic love story between two women. Underneath it is a story about women breaking free from conditioning and tribalism to save ourselves, each other, and the planet.

The reason the book is selling at astronomic levels is that this is what's needed in this exact moment. We need a woman to lead us out of the matrix of patriarchal capitalistic white supremacy, but we need her to do it a little clumsily and sweatily and simply by trying to live her own fucking life.

Now I ask you who the hell else can play this role but you? You are already this role.

I think the book is too huge in terms of its importance and its value to even put. And almost also because of the way it's written each piece of it, each individual... each story vignette.

So much of my life was transformed when I kind of figured out how to get back to that knowing.

And so we're trying to figure out how to just be. The parts of untamed that people responded to the most, I think, were this idea that there is a part of us that knows how to live and what we were meant for, but that we get that part drowned out by the expectations of our culture and by family and by religion and by all of these forces that tame us into forgetting our wild.

This was the whole point of Untamed.

Like we've been, we're conditioned with all these little stakes and applause from the people on the sidelines and whatever to continue the cheetah run when we actually, we were meant to be in the wherever cheetahs are supposed to fucking be.

And so I sat down in the office to write Untamed, and I could not do it because the office was too big and there were too many distractions.

You wrote the whole book, Untamed book, in the closet of the office.

In the closet of the office.

my cousin introduced me to untamed and I read it in a day.

So if the snakes holding each other till they die is on one end, it's one way. In my way of letting no one in ever or near me, there is a third way, right?

Remember when she read Untamed and then she posted on her Instagrams and saying how it like split her open and made her feel alive and then I died 1000 deaths of joy?

And it was wild because Abby and I when we were falling in love, Adele was like one of the soundtracks to our...

And then all the British tabloids started writing about us which was real wild for a week.

It was my journal page 235.

there's this quote from Untamed that people circulate a whole lot and um it's it says the braver I am the luckier I get.

My girlfriend gave me Untamed and like every probably like on page two, I had already underlined so many things and I just kept calling her.

It arrived at the, at a time where I was circling the drain and I, it just saved me.

I read certain chat, like I've read certain little excerpts at the right time, just like when I read your book at the right time when I'm feeling like, I read your book at the right time when I'm circling the drain.

I wrote a poem about it in untamed. It was like, I've always been midnight blue and you were this pearl color.

And after the Untamed extravaganza, people kept asking me, well, that's great that you've gotten Untamed. How do we get Untamed?

Oh, he's totally read Untamed.

I was thinking back to my own freaking book.

I was thinking back to untamed and the line that was like, 'these doors aren't even locked'.

Like these doors aren't even locked. Why are we staying here?

In your book, you said that your family did not feel loved by you when you were deep in your addiction.

She says, are you Glennon? And I said, yes, I am Glennon. And she said, okay. Um, I have to tell you that I am sitting right there.

And she points to her porch, finishing your book untamed right now. Like I literally finished the last page of your book, looked up and saw you standing in the middle of the street.

And I said, oh, I know that's why I'm here. I come to everybody's house when they're done. With the book.

Remember, I've told you all this story and I put in an untamed and I'll tell a brief version of it.

I'm sure I am one of many men who listened to your podcast and who have read or listened to Untamed. It's an amazing book.

I have read a whole chapter about it on Tamed.

and as you know or is in untamed I sat down with a long time trusted therapist that had been Craig and I's marriage therapist for a very long time

And the truth is, and I wrote about this in Untamed because I didn't look at it this way until after, but Craig, when we, when I found out I was pregnant, you told me that you weren't ready to get married.

I felt so freed by untamed, and I'm hoping you can help free me from my own body hate.

I do not in any way believe that there's anything wrong with me inherently or that I was born broken, which I wrote in my first memoir or that I have this like debilitating mental illness that will always...

Untamed came out the same year my book, Fear, Self-Compassion came out.

Maybe I'm presuming, but I love that book.

Oh, I love that sister books.

I'm Glen and Doyle, author of Untamed and host of the podcast We Can Do Hard Things.

My wife just finished reading Glenin's bestselling book Untamed and loved it.

Hello, I want to tell you about a podcast that I think you're gonna love on We Can Do Hard Things, best-selling author of Untamed, Glennon Doyle, former guest on this show, and her wife, Abby Wambach, also a former guest on this show, and Glennon's sister, Amanda Doyle, who's never been on this show, but I bet she will at some point.

Best-selling author of Untamed, Glennon Doyle, former guest on this show, and her wife, Abby Wambach, also a former guest on this show, and Glennon's sister, Amanda Doyle,

Our guest today is an author, activist and podcast host whose best selling books are Untamed, Love Warrior and Carry On Warrior.

I noticed it earlier. Love Warrior and Abby's. Abby Wombeck. Oh, and Untamed Glennon Doyle.

it's like I don't have any ideas all day but then when I get in the shower my brain is full of cool stuff I think it's the water or something

could be the water or it could be that the shower is the only place you're not plugged in so you can hear your own thoughts in there

this is called 'thinking' and it's something folks did before google

I'm Glen and Doyle, author of Untamed and host of the podcast We Can Do Hard Things.

Glennon Doyle's book, Untamed, has been a sensation of 2020 and beyond.

Glennon Doyle has written several bestselling books before Untamed, including Love Warrior.

Her books include Untamed and Love Warrior.