Untamed, by Glennon Doyle

Hey listeners! Welcome to another episode of Brown Girls Read podcast. This is your host Daman Tiwana and this is Khyati Thakur, and both of us love reading books. On this podcast, we bring our favorite books to you, and discuss the parts that were most meaningful to us and how we found them interesting or relatable as brown girls. 

Today, we are discussing Glennon Doyle’s memoir Untamed. Glennon is the author of bestselling books like Love Warrior and CarryOn, Warrior. She is also on the board of a non-profit organization Together Rising that helps immigrants and families, and does a lot of activism for communities at grassroots level. 

Before we start, let’s give our listeners an overview of the book— Untamed is Glennon Doyle’s memoir where she has talked about her journey to find her truest self— ending an unsatisfying marriage, and falling deeply in love with a woman while discovering how to be brave. She covers several topics like marriage, children, gender roles, therapy, recovery from substance abuse, religion and so much more.. And she shares her personal experiences with these with great honesty.. 

Like Khyati mentioned, Glennon’s memoir covers several topics but, What we found most interesting was her experiences and learnings around gender roles.. right.. But before we go into that I think we should also give our listeners a little insight into her marriage or marriages. 

Glennon was married to a guy for like a decade and they had 3 children together. She felt unsatisfied in the marriage, like she felt that something was wrong. Her husband cheated on her and she made desperate attempts to keep their marriage intact. And in the midst of all this, she fell in love with a woman (her name is Abby). After some time, her and Abby decided to tell Glennon’s mom about their relationship. And that’s the first instance mentioned in her memoir.  

And do you remember her mom’s reaction to this news? Her mom says that the last she saw her daughter this happy was when her daughter was 10 years old.

Can you imagine how radically opposite this scene would have been if this was a brown household? I loved how she and Abby met– because of books!!! And going back to your question.. The way she discovered her sexuality much later in life, and accepted it– is an act of bravery. That being said, I can’t imagine this playing out, forget playing out well, in our society. I think the values around us are so rigid, they don’t leave much room for us to change, grow or discover ourselves.  I think we have discussed this in our previous podcasts as well that much of our life is prescribed for us, and it’s a lot of shaming and ostracizing if you sway from the path that was decided. [Add ½ personal kinda sentences]

There would be honor killing at this point I think. And even if parents agree to it, the neighbors and the society would make it impossible for the family to live with dignity.

Even for glennon i don’t think it was necessarily easy either.. She has mentioned that she struggled in her marriage and still found it hard to leave.. And still tired a lot to make it work..  They tried couples therapy.. 

When she falls in love with this woman, she is still married to her husband and she tells her therapist about her new love. Her therapist’s reaction is like what I can expect everyone around me to react if something like this happens to me.

I found that therapist so inappropriate.. Instead of listening to her or validating her feelings, the therapist is so insistent on meeting the man’s needs still. Like wtf! Why isn’t she equally important in this “couples counseling “ or do subconsciously man’s desires hold more value no matter what situation or however horrible the man has been. It’s something that’s part of our culture too I think— pleasing a man is subtly emphasized as wifely duty. 

This is like an Indian mom blaming her daughter for getting cheated on by her husband. Because it was her fault that she couldn’t seduce him enough. That’s bullshit!

Yeah it just sucks.. Why isn’t there equal blame on both partners, if there is blame? Why are women always answerable for shortcomings of anyone? And it was even worse that this well-educated therapist who is supposed to have greater understanding also acted in the same way…  it’s like years of education couldn’t wash away the conditioning. 

While we are discussing therapy, she mentions that she went to a recovery meeting when she decided to stop doing drugs(and this is way before she was married or had kids). And a woman there, tells her that she is supposed to feel everything. And she mentions that ” I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was a weakness”.

I think these words hurt me so much. Our society puts a lot of emphasis on happiness. As if, happiness is something eternal. Like once you achieve happiness, you have made it in life. But that’s so fucking not how life is supposed to be.

Glennon talks a lot about gender roles and expectations– the boxes we have put ourselves in… Discuss gender roles in our culture? What traits do you find feminine in men? Or masculine in women?

I think one thing that I used to find feminine in men was if I find out that a guy uses a pink colored soap, or like a feminine perfume. But then I thought about it and I realized it’s only because the smells and the colors have also been categorized into feminine and masculine by the culture.

The part with the difference between boys and girls shampoos just hit home.. and it’s so true that subtly these products media everyone is enforcing gender in a toxic way. Yeah… She mentions that she noticed how society is still telling boys that real men are big, bold, violent, invulnerable and so on and girls are being taught that real women must be pretty, small, passive and desirable. And she noticed this through the difference in the shampoo bottle of her son vs her daughter.  Khyati, do you remember getting any such messages growing up? 

Now that I think about it, yes. I don’t remember the name of the actual product but in general, any product that has to deal with cleaning utensils or cleaning the home is marketed as extra strong and almost always, these products either have a masculine name or they have a photo of an extra masculine, muscled man associated with it. For instance, if you google Mr. Clean right now, you’ll see what I am talking about.

Another incident that really stood out to me was.. When she approaches her son’s friends, and asks if they’re hungry— all boys go yes, while girls: Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. I wonder how many of us have been there..? How about you Khyati? I think it’s an unsaid code that you cannot be the only girl eating. 

And that’s so fucking true! Even growing up, if my brother wanted something..like even a toy, he would directly ask my parents. But I would be shy to ask them for anything. And I am not saying it’s our parent’s fault or they denied me of anything. But I truly think that it has been so ingrained in our minds, that we shouldn’t ask for what we want, that it’s impolite and selfish that we – like she said – stay hungry!

There’s another thing she mentions that I think we all women would relate to… She mentions that When I was in my twenties, I believed that somewhere there existed a perfect human woman. She woke up beautiful, unbloated, clear skinned, fluffy haired, fearless, lucky in love, calm, and confident. Her life was…easy. She haunted me like a ghost. I tried so hard to be her. — I think all of us have been haunted by ghosts like this.

Yeah! Actually, I remember when I was overweight and I was talking to my gym teacher about how to get motivated to lose weight, he asked me to put up a poster of my favorite actress in my room and get motivated to become like her. So yeah, I think it stems from all the unreal expectations of women’s beauty shown in the movies as well.

Oh god!!! That can be so destructive for your self worth… I can see what the intent is there, on the surface it does look like motivation, but it is so much more… it cuts much deeper, and it’s just sad that people don’t get it… 

There’s another related point that she has written where she says: “We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves”

I completely understand what she means here. So often we have seen women sacrifice their sleep, their diet, their beliefs, their careers for other people. And these women, they make other women who keep themselves first, feel guilty about being selfish. 

I think we talk about feminism and gender equality but this is gender equality 101. If we want feminism to become a thing, we have to keep ourselves first and not expect men or some other woman or the society to do that for us.

Exactly! we proclaim: Women are entitled to take their rightful place! Then, when a woman does take her rightful place, our first reaction is: She’s so…entitled.— she is right about our training and subconscious biases. I think we have all been guilty of this, if distrusting a happy confident woman. How can a woman be happy with herself? How can she be at peace? 

Brownie points

• Right from the beginning, this book gives you so much food for thought and you know that it’s going to be a daring read. It starts with Captivity and taming explained beautifully with an example of a cheetah born and raised at zoo— how even though the cheetah never knew wilderness something inside Her still calls instinctively. How she longs for a life better than this, although she doesn’t know what that life is
• At various points in the book she has encouraged women to stand up for themselves, to trust themselves, to not let their curiosity die, to be selfish in their pursuits and I absolutely loved her writing for that.
• “I Have a son and two daughters, until they tell me otherwise.”— I loved this. I think all children deserve this. Instead of being boxed into gender roles right away. Yeah, I liked the way she is parenting her kids.
• (-) Although, after sometime it starts to feel like that she is justifying her choices. I don’t know why it felt that way. Maybe because the same thing to follow your instincts is repeated so many times in the book. But after a while it starts to feel redundant.. 
• (-) writing style at some points was off putting for me. I like to go deeper into the story, know more, learn more.. but many potions felt like just dipping my toes in and moving on to do the same again. 

So this was our discussion on the book Untamed by Glennon Doyle. We definitely encourage you guys to pick it up, it’s a very honest, bold and raw account of her life and experiences and comes packed with many life lessons.. And in the end I’ll read my favorite part from the book: Monalisa story : “Mona Lisa and her husband lost a baby. Sometime later, her husband commissioned this painting from da Vinci to celebrate the birth of another baby. Mona Lisa sat for Leonardo to paint her, but she wouldn’t smile during the sitting. Not all the way. The story goes that da Vinci wanted her to smile wider, but she refused. She did not want the joy she felt for her new baby to erase the pain she felt from losing the first. There in her half smile is her half joy. Or maybe it’s her full joy and her full grief all at the same time. She has the look of a woman who has just realized a dream but still carries the lost dream inside her. She wanted her whole life to be present on her face. She wanted everyone to remember, so she wouldn’t pretend.” Now I understand what the fuss is all about. Mona Lisa is the patron saint of honest, resolute, fully human women—women who feel and who know. She is saying for us: Don’t tell me to smile. I will not be pleasant. Even trapped here, inside two dimensions, you will see the truth. You will see my life’s brutal and beautiful right here on my face. The world will not be able to stop staring.

I love the story so much. And I agree with the story so much. All the women need to stop pretending to be pleasant all the time and they should have all the parts of their lives written on their faces – the bad, the annoying and the ugly. 

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For our next episode we’re reading The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi. We hope you’ll be reading with us and until then, Keep listening!