Untamed summary

Have you ever had an experience that changed your whole life in the blink of an eye? Glennon Doyle certainly has. When she met American soccer player Abby Wambach, it turned her life upside down. 

Doyle was a married woman and a successful Christian writer. She’d never been attracted to another woman before. But as soon as she laid eyes on Abby, she was gripped by a fierce longing that she couldn't ignore. 

A couple of years after she met Abby, Doyle and her children took a trip to the zoo. There, she saw a beautiful cheetah reduced to chasing after fluffy toy animals for the entertainment of the watching crowds. The cheetah was restricted to a small cage, all her wildness stamped out of her. 

Watching her, Doyle felt a pang of recognition. For most of her life she, too, had lost touch with her untamed nature. She'd contorted herself into smaller and smaller cages to try and become the perfect woman that society expected her to be. 

Like people in an old-fashioned courtship, Doyle and Abby started writing letters back and forth. With each letter they exchanged, they fell deeper and deeper in love. Even though they’d only met once, their connection was undeniable. 

But how could they be together? They lived on opposite coasts and were both married to other people, although Abby was in the process of splitting up with her wife. Doyle knew that if she really wanted to be with Abby, she’d have to leave her husband, but the prospect terrified her. There was no guarantee that things would work out, and breaking up her family went against everything Doyle believed about being a good mother. One important thing cut through her doubts: imagining how she’d feel if one of her daughters came to her in the same predicament.

About to embark on a promotional tour for Love Warrior, Doyle found herself facing a tough decision. She'd publicized her separation from her husband, but hadn’t mentioned that she’d fallen in love with a woman. Should she hide the truth, or tell her readers what had really happened?

Her publishing team was panicking. Love Warrior had been selected for Oprah’s book club and was almost guaranteed to be a best seller. They were certain that revealing the truth would derail Doyle’s career and counseled her to keep things under wraps until after the tour.

While coming out publicly had been easier than she'd expected, Doyle still faced lots of opposition to her decision. Some prominent Christian leaders claimed that she had abandoned her faith. Many in her community found it hard to understand why she was leaving her husband. Hardest of all, her mom believed that Doyle’s relationship with Abby was a mistake.

Doyle counted her mother among the people who knew her best. Ordinarily, she took her opinions very seriously. But now that she'd gotten back in touch with her ten-year-old self, she knew how dangerous it was to be swayed by outside opinions. 

Doyle’s new relationship with Abby affected all areas of her life. It especially affected how she approached her religion. Doyle was an established member of the Christian community, but now she was in a relationship with a woman – something that many Christians believe to be an enormous sin. How could she possibly reconcile those different identities?

When her children were young, Doyle had attended a church service, one that seemed very welcoming – until the pastor proclaimed that being Christian meant believing that homosexuality and abortion were sins. When she tried to discuss it with him afterward, he shut her down. To be really faithful, he argued, Doyle should simply trust that what he said was the truth. Even before coming out, she had a problem with that approach. Why should she allow a pastor to be a middleman between her and God?

When Doyle's eldest daughter, Tish, wanted to try out for a soccer team, Doyle’s heart sank. Tish was sensitive and easily upset. She’d never been particularly athletic. Doyle feared that she would be crushed if she didn't make the team.

But Abby was convinced that Tish had potential and encouraged her to give it a try. Day after day, Tish and Abby went through a grueling training regimen together. Tish grumbled all the time, but she kept at it. Eventually, she made it onto the soccer team, to everyone's surprise and delight. 

When racism and violence against people of color increased in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Doyle was motivated to teach her daughters about the civil rights movement. When they studied a photo of a protest that showed a crowd of black civil rights activists and a lone white woman holding a protest sign, her youngest daughter asked if they would have gone to the march. Doyle was about to say, “Yes, of course!” when her older daughter replied, “No, we don't march now. Why would we have marched then?” 

Doyle realized that her daughter was right. She believed in racial equality. But she didn't show up to Black Lives Matter marches to fight for it.

Like any good writer, Doyle wanted to be able to control the narrative of her life. That was partly why she'd felt so furious with her husband. When he cheated, he'd “fucked up her story” of having the perfect family. By writing her memoir Love Warrior, she’d tried to repair the damage and use the story to affirm that they were still the perfect family – after all, they could survive betrayal and emerge stronger.

But if her husband's betrayal was a plot twist, Abby's arrival in her life was a narrative catastrophe. It forced Doyle to reconsider the stories she’d been telling herself her whole life, ones about what it meant to be in a good marriage. For the first time, she had no idea where her story might go next.