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New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

by Glennon Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2020

Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.

More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.

In her third book, Doyle ( Love Warrior , 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.

Pub Date: March 10, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Dial Books

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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SEEN & HEARD

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Jon Krakauer

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A Third Glennon Doyle Memoir? Yes, and Here’s Why

With “Untamed,” the Momastery founder unpacks the many changes in her life since her previous two books, including her divorce from her husband and her marriage to the soccer star Abby Wambach.

By Elisabeth Egan

Glennon Doyle has written two best sellers, raised over $25 million for people in need through her nonprofit Together Rising, considers Oprah a teacher and friend, and has more than 700,000 Facebook followers. But sometimes even she is a disappointment.

“I’m terrible at friendship maintenance,” she said over breakfast last month at Manhattan’s Whitby Hotel. “If you have a crisis, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do. If your dad died, if you need to write a eulogy, I’ll drop everything. But then I will never call you; I’ll never check in. I’ve spent a lot of time in shame about this, but I feel like I’m doing a good job with the mom thing and the work thing and a freshly good job with the partnering thing.”

Friendship is among the many topics — including sisterhood, body image, cheetahs (just go with it) and her efforts to better understand racism as a white woman — covered by Doyle in her third memoir, “Untamed,” coming out from The Dial Press on Tuesday. You may be wondering: Why a third memoir, particularly when the second, “ Love Warrior ,” came out in 2016?

Doyle, 43, answers the question in the first sentence of “Untamed”: “Four years ago, married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.”

She was in Chicago, promoting “Love Warrior,” which explores how she and her then-husband, Craig Melton, had recommitted to their marriage after he confessed to cheating on her multiple times. Her fans, many of them avid readers of her Christian parenting blog, Momastery , were counting the days until the book went on sale. Flatiron, her publisher, had announced a first printing of 150,000 copies, an extensive tour was in the works and “Love Warrior” was about to be named an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Inconveniently, that was when she met Abby Wambach — World Cup champion, Olympic gold medalist, former captain of the U.S. women’s soccer team — who was promoting her own memoir, “Forward.”

“We couldn’t have been a worse fit for each other,” Wambach said in an interview. “Glennon had a husband and three children and lived in Naples, Fla. I’d been sober for a month, my marriage was falling apart, I’d just left my soccer career of 30 years and I lived in Portland, Ore.”

“My whole being says, There She Is ,” Doyle writes in “Untamed” about their first interaction. “ I ask if I can hug her because what if this is my only chance? She smiles and opens her arms. Then — the smell that will become home to me — skin like powder and fabric softener blended with the wool of her coat and her cologne and something that smelled like air, like outdoors, like crisp sky, like a baby and a woman and a man and the whole world.”

How they navigated from that night to their wedding a year later is the central thread of “Untamed.” Spoiler alert: The story appears to have a happy ending, or beginning. Wambach and Craig Melton have even played together on the same adult-league soccer team.

Of Melton’s support of her relationship with his and Doyle’s children, Wambach says, “It’s a gift I don’t know if I can repay — probably the most selfless act of grace or love I’ve ever experienced.”

In an interview, Melton said: “I’ve seen a lot of people in similar situations where the two exes put their egos first and the kids suffer. I wanted to be the best role model I could, knowing there was some damage that was my fault in the relationship.”

Doyle grew up in Burke, Va., in a family with a strong tradition of putting words on paper. That she became a writer didn’t surprise her younger sister, Amanda Doyle. “Glennon is the one everyone always went to when they needed to write their wedding vows or something important,” she said.

Starting when her children were toddlers, Glennon Doyle sent daily email musings about recovery, faith, parenting and marriage to a handful of close friends. She’d follow up a few hours later to get their thoughts; most of the time, they hadn’t had a chance to read her dispatch. In 2009, after a friend sent Doyle a website-building tutorial, she took the hint, and Momastery was born.

“The only reason my writing ever got out into the world was because my friends didn’t want to read it anymore,” Doyle said. “The very first time I wrote something and people I didn’t know were like, ‘Whoa, that’s honest,’ I felt a prickle at the back of my neck. I felt this ‘we-ness.’”

Whitney Frick, editorial director at The Dial Press, remembers reading the proposal for Doyle’s first memoir, “Carry On, Warrior,” as it came out of the printer, page by page. “I wasn’t religious, wasn’t married, hadn’t had a baby,” said Frick, who worked with Doyle at another publisher at the time, “but I could still relate to what Glennon was saying. I thought, ‘I want that voice in my head!’”

Others do, too. “ Lessons From the Mental Hospital ,” a TEDx talk by Doyle in 2013, the year that “Carry On, Warrior” came out, has been viewed more than three million times. Frick remembers 400 people showing up that year for one of Doyle’s readings in Connecticut, and another at Books-a-Million near Doyle’s Virginia hometown, where readers arrived hours in advance. “There was no stage or microphone,” Frick said. “She climbed on a ladder, opened her arms and yelled, ‘Hello, everyone!’”

It was around that time that Doyle was learning about her husband’s infidelities. Reflecting on it in her new book, she writes: “The revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot.”

Writing “Untamed” came with its own struggles. Elizabeth Gilbert , a friend and the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” lent an ear and some critical feedback when Doyle shared an early draft.

“I started reading to Liz, and I’m watching her, and she’s literally sinking deeper and deeper into the couch,” Doyle said. “She was like, ‘You’re writing a book about wildness and you’re not writing it wild.’”

Gilbert suggested that Doyle cut out all the “connective tissue” and tell one personal story after another. “That’s where Glennon shines, and that’s what we all want from her — intimate, funny, moving stories that will reflect light back on our own existence,” Gilbert said.

Doyle said she writes from her scars, not her wounds. She has learned to give the events of her life some breathing room before pouring them onto the page or the screen. When she announced her relationship with Wambach on Instagram , the responses were swift, supportive and, considering they came mostly from strangers, surprisingly familiar. One follower wrote: “You are so brave to put your soul on social media. Wishing you all the love we all deserve.” Another sent best wishes and a caveat: “This picture would suggest that you’re using your hair straightener again and that concerns me. You have amazing hair and it should remain in its natural state.”

Doyle’s biggest fans have long known that her journey hasn’t been without its bumps, but she discloses even more of them in “Untamed,” including the turmoil she and her family went through (“Good mothers don’t break their children’s hearts to follow their own”) after she fell in love with Wambach.

Will another seismic event disrupt the release of “Untamed”? “I’m kind of scared because something big usually happens,” Doyle said. “This book is what I’ve been wanting to say since I was born. I’ve finally gotten to the point where what I want for the future is more of what I have. Not something different.”

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Author Interviews

'there's no map': glennon doyle on living an 'untamed' life.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro

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Author and blogger Glennon Doyle has something to tell all the women out there trying to put a brave face on a terrible situation, juggling home life with all the other expectations placed on them as the world seems like it's falling apart: "I think every woman on earth needs to lower her expectations for herself, exponentially. At this point, we're not trying to be amazing. We are just trying to make it through the day." Her new book is called Untamed , and it details how she found her truest self — ending an unsatisfying marriage, and falling deeply in love with a woman while discovering how to be brave.

Interview Highlights

On when women start losing themselves

Around 10 years old, we begin to lose who we are, when we start learning how to please ... when we start to internalize our social programming. So that's when we learn how to be a "good girl," a "strong boy, a "good Christian, a "good woman." And, you know, over and over again, we hear from women that their taming, their social programming, came when they learned how to be quiet, and kind, and sweet, and accommodating, and pleasing, and pretty.

On her first marriage

What I would say is that I had a bad marriage to a good man. Right? I had a kind of marriage where I was not happy, and there was a lot going on that was less than freeing and less than true. But because he was a good man ... I had the kind of marriage that women are trained to be grateful for. ... I think, over and over again, there's sort of a gaslighting of women. It's everywhere. It's every time we admit that we want more, we're told we should just be grateful for what you have. It's the first story I ever learned about women, like the story of Eve: If you want more and you go for it, you will destroy yourself and the world.

On meeting her partner Abby Wambach

When I met Abby, there was a voice inside of me that I finally recognized as my own. ... And following my love for her was a turning point in my life, but not just because I chose her. It was because I finally honored myself. Right? I chose to, for the first time, abandon everyone else's expectations of me instead of abandoning myself. And I think that's what I'm trying to get out of this book, which is this idea that we can let go of the expectations, and shoulds, and supposed-tos that the world gives us and just honor who we actually are and have always been.

On modeling marriage and motherhood for her children

I decided to stay in a less than healthy marriage for a long time because of my children. ... One day I was braiding my daughter Tish's hair, and I looked at her and I thought, oh, my God, I'm staying in this marriage for her. But would I want this marriage for her? And if I would not want this marriage for her, then why am I modeling bad love and calling that good mothering?

"I'm so sick of self-improvement ..." says author Glennon Doyle. "Stop trying to be a good this, a good that ... and just be who you are." Doyle says her new book Unt amed is about "self returning." Amy Paulson/Random House Publishing Group hide caption

"I'm so sick of self-improvement ..." says author Glennon Doyle. "Stop trying to be a good this, a good that ... and just be who you are." Doyle says her new book Unt amed is about "self returning."

And that's when I realized, oh this idea of mother as martyr — that mothers have to prove their love by slowly dying, by burying their own needs, and their own ambition, and their own desires, and their own emotions ... this is just another way we get women to disappear. ... Don't take culture's definition of good mothering, because all culture will tell you is to keep disappearing. What I decided is that a good mother is not a martyr, a good mother is a model, right? That children will only allow themselves permission to live as fully as their parents do. And so we must not settle for any relationship, for any community, for any nation less true and beautiful than the one we would want for our babies.

On resisting the urge to run everything by your girlfriends

I have a boy and two girls — until they tell me otherwise — and my son had a bunch of friends over and I walked into the room and I said to them, is anybody hungry? And all the boys answered, "yes," without taking their eyes off the TV. The girls said nothing, took their eyes off the TV and started looking at each other's faces. And I'll never forget it, because I thought: Oh, we girls, in every moment of uncertainty are trained not to look inside themselves, but to look outside of themselves for approval, for permission, for consensus. ... A girl who at 10 years old can't tell you if she's hungry or not, becomes a woman at 40 years old who is still asking her friends if they approve of the person she's dating. ...There's decisions that we can make as a community that we can call our friends about. And there are decisions that can only be made by going inward and deciding for ourselves. Because in the end, when we're talking about our lives, there's no map. Right? We're all pioneers.

On the coronavirus

Women taking care of everything during extraordinary circumstances is nothing new. Right? We've been doing this since the beginning of time. This is just a different iteration of it. And so, you know, every woman that I know right now is juggling work, relationships, home, her own anxiety, her own fear, which is what we do every day.

This is a hell of a lot too much family togetherness for me. ... what I'm saying to my people is: We just lower expectations right now. Right? Our children are not going to learn what they would have learned in school. You know what they'll learn? They will learn that sometimes things are completely out of our control. And in the end, what matters is how we take care of ourselves and each other. So whatever you need to do to take care of yourself and each other. Do it right now.

On her strategy for finding her inner voice

One of the reasons it is so hard to find our inner voice is because the voices outside of us are so loud. Over time, we have lived more and more of an exterior life. Right? We are always looking at our phones. We are always listening to the TV. We are always listening to outer voices. And so one of the things that changed my life is a practice of spending a few minutes a day just with no other voices, and just listening. Getting back in touch with the inner voice ... I do not think that everyone needs to leave their husband and marry a female Olympian — although I highly recommend it — but what I do think is that everyone needs to practice honoring that inner voice.

This interview was edited for radio by Hiba Ahmad and Hadeel Al-Shalchi, and adapted for the Web by Beth Novey and Petra Mayer.