SELF HELP, SELF LOVE
Celebrities from Adele to Oprah and more gush over author’s guide to stop pleasing others
Sparks, apples, directions, polar bears, algorithms. It reads like the next list of five random nouns Donald Trump has memorized to prove he’s cognitively all there.
But these are in fact a few of the chapter titles of untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living — the part memoir, part self-help book that celebrities have been falling over themselves to recommend this year.
Reese Witherspoon, Oprah, Gwyneth Paltrow and Emma Watson have all included Glennon Doyle’s tome on their lists of mustreads. But its latest A-list acolyte, Adele, offered what might be the most luminous review yet.
“This book will shake your brain and make your soul scream,” the singer wrote to her 38.5 million Instagram followers. “It’s as if I just flew into my body for the first time. Whew! Anyone who has any kind of capacity to truly let go and give into yourself with any kind of desire to hold on for dear life — Do it. Read it. Live it. Practice it.”
She urged readers to have “a highlighter on hand” as they go, and reveals it has made her aware “I am solely responsible for my own joy, happiness and freedom! Who knew our own liberation liberates those around us? Cause I didn’t! I thought we were meant to be stressed and dishevelled, confused and selfless like a Disney character!” Then she finished in true Adele style: “ProBloodyFound!! You’re an absolute don Glennon.” (Doyle dubbed her a “goddamn cheetah” in response.)
The recommendation is perhaps the first official — there have been many unofficial — insight into Adele’s radical transformation since her divorce from Simon Konecki (with whom she shares a seven-year-old son, Angelo) in September 2019.
A photograph posted on her 32nd birthday this year showed significant weight loss, the kind that sent fans and social media dwellers into a tailspin, and while she is expected to release a fourth album soon, she doesn’t appear in an overwhelming hurry to finish it. Instead, it seems, she’s done as the subtitle of her new favourite book urges and “stopped pleasing, started living.”
The guide behind that principle is untamed’s author, Glennon Doyle, a 44-year-old former “Christian mummy blogger” turned behemoth of the “inspiration industry.”
Doyle describes herself as “an activist, speaker and thought leader,” but she is also the founder of Together Rising, an all-women-led non-profit organization that has raised more than $20 million for women, children and families in crisis, as well as the presenter of TED Talks, who appears on endless panels for the likes of Goop and Oprah, while managing her own million Instagram followers.
Busy, then — as you might imagine of somebody who wrote a third memoir by her mid-40s.
Raised in Virginia, Doyle’s teen years included struggles with mental health issues and bulimia — the former becoming so acute that she spent time in a psychiatric hospital: her 2013 TED Talk Lessons from the Mental Hospital has been viewed three million times — before becoming addicted to alcohol, drugs and food in early adulthood.
She got sober when she married former model Craig Melton in 2002. They had three children and moved to Florida, but Doyle became depressed, anxious and dissatisfied with life there.
A devout Christian, she started a blog, Momastery, in which she vowed to “tell the truth” about motherhood.
It gained a steady following until one essay, Don’t Carpe Diem, went viral.
“Clearly, Carpe Diem doesn’t work for me,” Doyle wrote in it, “I can’t even carpe 15 minutes in a row so a whole diem is out of the question.”
People loved it.
A book deal followed, 10 publishers squabbling for her signature, and Doyle’s essay collection, Carry
On, Warrior, debuted at No. 3 on The New York Times’s bestseller list in 2013.
Things were looking up — until, just before she left for the book tour, Melton told his wife of 11 years that he had been cheating on her throughout their marriage. There had been many one-night stands, he said, in addition to a porn addiction.
“The revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart,” Doyle writes in untamed. “I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot.”
So she put pen to paper again. The next memoir, Love Warrior, told of how she and Melton saved their marriage, and had just been chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, when life had another twist. At an event on the book’s publicity tour in 2016, Doyle met Abby Wambach — a former captain of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who was promoting her own memoir, Forward — and love struck.
“We couldn’t have been a worse fit for each other,” Wambach remembers of that meeting.
“Glennon had a husband and three children and lived in Florida.
I’d been sober for a month, my marriage (to fellow soccer player Sarah Huffman) was falling apart, I’d just left my soccer career of 30 years and I lived in Oregon.”
Inconvenient, then, but with Melton and Huffman’s blessing, the two women began a relationship and were married a year later. Wambach calls Melton’s support for the marriage and her involvement with his children as “probably the most selfless act of grace or love I’ve ever experienced”, while Melton — who, amazingly, once played soccer with Wambach long before his ex became her wife — said he “wanted to be the best role model I could, knowing there was some damage that was my fault in the relationship.”
Sure was, Melton. And so now we have untamed, the result of a rare case of a writer having enough material to fill a third memoir within a decade.
Doyle and Wambach seem to be still living happily ever after, and the former’s story of resilience, resolve and remarriage have made her an icon in the inspiration-driven world of social media influencers.
London Daily Telegraph