Untamed

What It’s About:

We have this message, an implicit training, for women: stay small, stay quiet, and do what’s expected of you. Doyle highlights how these messages begin early, showing up in stories from Little Red Riding Hood to Eve in the bible; they demonstrate how being curious and wanting more are not only bad but dangerous.

Doyle wrestles with the implicates of accepting the call to be small, good, tamed. What does it mean for us as women, as mothers, as partners, and as a society?

And then, she considers how we can break free from the expected minimizing, to become untamed.

(Amazon)

I unbecame a mother slowly dying in her children’s name and became a responsible mother: one who shows her children how to be fully alive.

My review

I read this book in August 2020 when the world was upside down in many ways. I remember that the book was good, impactful, and significant. I know that I’ve referred back to some of the core ideas over the years (dropping into our knowing, letting down others before letting ourselves down, self-abandonment, etc). But when a friend mentioned in May 2024 that she was reading, I took a little time revisit the book, along with my notes from 2020.

I was shocked to just how meaningful the book was to me, based on how my life so clearly echoes many of the messages in the book. In other words: it is apparent to me how many changes I’ve made in my life over the last 4 years since reading the ideas in this book. Doyle opens some doors in this book about knowing yourself, trusting yourself, and staying by your own side. She provides outlines for boundaries, care, and recovery.

Quotes from the book

Destruction is essential to construction. If we want to build the new, we must be willing to let the old burn. We must be committed to holding on to nothing but the truth. We must decide that if the truth inside us can burn a belief, a family structure, a business, a religion, an industry—it should have become ashes yesterday. (Loc. 875)

Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. 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. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn. (Loc. 899)

I love myself now. Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty. I trust myself to have my own back, so my allegiance is to the voice within. I’ll abandon everyone else’s expectations of me before I’ll abandon myself. I’ll disappoint everyone else before I’ll disappoint myself. I’ll forsake all others before I’ll forsake myself. Me and myself: We are till death do us part. (Loc. 1335)

What if love is not the process of disappearing for the beloved but of emerging for the beloved? What if a mother’s responsibility is teaching her children that love does not lock the lover away but frees her? What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?

…My children need to watch me save myself. (Loc. 1442)

What if parenting became less about telling our children who they should be and more about asking them again and again forever who they already are? Then, when they tell us, we would celebrate instead of concede. (Loc. 2576)

Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully. (Loc. 3151)

Conclusion

I’m incredibly grateful not only that I read this book but that I read it in 2020 when it already felt like we were all at some version of rock bottom. But Doyle reminds us that “while rock bottom feels like the end—it’s always the beginning of something” and that has been my experience: both 2020 and this book were the beginning of something big for me.

My rating for this book:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

✅ A must-read

✅ A fast read

✅ Short chapters