Untamed

Doyle is an activist, speaker, and best-selling author. Those who are new to her work may be pleasantly surprised to discover how much her powerful personality shines through every page. She is a terrific storyteller: personable, engaging, and likable. Her honesty can be disarming ... A bracing jolt of honesty from someone who knows what she wants to say and isn’t afraid to say it.

Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid ... 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 ... 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 ... Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.

... many stories end too neatly, with heavy-handed messages of inner power and freedom. Freedom is an important concept in this memoir, but the language of freedom and liberation has larger connotations outside of white women’s experience of patriarchy ... Agency is essential in Untamed — the ability to trust oneself is, according to Doyle, the key to so-called freedom. But there are things individuals can do and things they can’t, often based on outside constraints. Doyle swings between recognizing this and insisting that women have everything they need inside them. Often overusing the words 'power,' 'freedom,' 'Knowing' and 'Self,' Untamed reads like a self-help book for wealthy white women. When it treads lightly into the complex territories of race, privilege, misogyny and capitalism, it boomerangs back to the tired language of every affirmation book ever written ... The book sags with one-liners and clichés ... After a while, the platitudes and pseudo-empowering statements begin to blend together and sound the same ... Where the book manages to be unique and interesting is in the tension between Doyle’s Christian identity and her marriage to a woman ... does not bring a queer ethos to its storytelling, but rather happens to have a lesbian relationship in a narrative that has Lean In vibes — that is, general, oversimplified advice about finding and cultivating inner power that only works for a certain subset of the population.