Love Warrior summary

From the day she hit puberty to the day she got married, Glennon walked a challenging path. And she knows it’s not going to get any easier – not for a while, anyway. The path ahead is still filled with obstacles and setbacks. But despite the difficulties she experienced in adolescence and young adulthood, these years also have lessons to teach Glennon.

Throughout middle school, Glennon felt big. Heavy. Like she was taking up too much space in the world. In a way, she’d simply absorbed the message that society has for all girls: there is an ideal of femininity, and you need to conform to it. Bulimia became Glennon’s way of conforming, of literally shedding weight so she didn’t take up more space than society had for her.

When her first son, Chase Doyle Melton, is born, Glennon feels for the first time in a long time like she’s done something right. Motherhood makes her feel alive and fills her with a sense of purpose. Craig, too, is besotted with his young son. When they’re cooing over Chase, walking him in his stroller, or watching for his first smile, everything feels perfectly right. Nothing can touch their happiness. They might as well be the only three people in the world.

But the joy of parenting can’t paper over the cracks in Glennon and Craig’s marriage. Not forever.

In the depths of addiction and disordered eating, in the aftermath of her abortion, Glennon thought she would never be worthy of marriage or motherhood. Now she has everything she thought she could never have. She should be the happiest she’s ever been. But marriage to Craig is complicated, and even motherhood, her redemption and the source of great joy, has unexpected challenges.

When she looks back on this period of her life, she can see that all these difficulties are tied up in a greater problem: she simply wasn’t speaking her truth. And she still isn’t.

When Glennon is diagnosed with Lyme disease, it feels like a blessing in disguise. Sure, there are days she’s so tired she can’t move or speak, when even the slightest touch leaves her yelping in pain. But Craig decides humid, tropical air will cure her. The family takes a trip to Naples, Florida. And, miraculously, Glennon begins to recover. Even more miraculously, Craig suggests they stay in Naples permanently. So, they move. Craig works from home. Glennon writes full time. Their family is closer and happier than ever.

Glennon thinks maybe this is the fresh start she needed all along, forgetting that previous fresh starts, like marriage and motherhood, had never provided the simple solutions she was looking for.

So, how does Glennon get back off that bathroom floor? Well, to begin with, she does it by writing. She opens her laptop and makes two lists. 

The first is titled “Questions I Can’t Answer Yet.” Here, she writes things like, “Will we ever be a family again?”

Craig is home and the family is whole again. Everything would be perfect if Glennon’s pesky feelings didn’t keep getting in the way. She still feels betrayed, unsafe, and angry. It would be convenient if she could ignore these feelings. 

But Glennon knows how masking and silencing her truth has turned out for her in the past. So, she turns to therapy. 

In the tentative early stages of her reconciliation with Craig, Glennon goes to a hot-yoga class where the teacher asks her to set an intention. Feeling intimidated, she says her intention is simply to stay on her mat, no matter what. That’s what she does. While the other attendees twist and bend, she sits on her mat. All the painful memories and emotions she’s been trying to outrun catch up with her. She wants to leave. She doesn’t. She wants to cry. She does. At the end of the class, she is still on the mat.

The teacher tells Glennon that there is a name in yoga for what she has just done. It is the Journey of the Warrior.