The best-selling memoirist wants women to tell the truth about their lives.
On the morning before the Presidential election, the author and activist Glennon Doyle was drinking coffee in bed, exhausted. For the past forty days, she had led her 1.5 million Instagram followers in taking an action each day to disempower Trump: phone banking, exploring the details of absentee ballots, contributing to progressive candidacies, discussing civics with Elizabeth Warren (who told Doyle, “You, in a time of complete insanity, are a voice for reminding us all we have a center, we have a heart”). But that’s not why she was tired. She hadn’t stopped cleaning in days. “I did the house, then I did the garage, and then yesterday we moved on to the storage unit,” she said. Doyle’s wife, the soccer legend Abby Wambach, who was stretched out next to her, added, “It sucks in the moment. But now I don’t have to think about that storage unit ever again. And we’re saving four hundred and thirty-three dollars and ninety-nine cents a month.” Doyle nodded and said, “Anxiety has fringe benefits.” The frenzy of organizational activity had been a distraction from pre-election dread. “This is one of those just-keep-going moments,” she continued. “Like: We’re not going to feel any of the feelings. Let’s just keep our little hearts frozen.”
From Doyle, this is apostasy. She has a sticky note on her bathroom mirror that reads “Feel It All.” In her most recent memoir, “Untamed,” she writes, “Every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain: Don’t avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become.” During a Goop video chat in the early days of quarantine, Doyle advised Gwyneth Paltrow, “All feelings are for feeling.”
Doyle, who is forty-four, has always espoused experiencing vividly all that is beautiful and brutal in the world. “Life is brutiful,” she wrote in her first book, “Carry On, Warrior,” in 2013. At the time, she was married to a man, and “Christian mommy blogger”—her least favorite sobriquet—was a pretty accurate description of her job. Her blog, Momastery, offered readers a look at her life as a progressive Christian raising three children which was intimate, unguarded, self-revealing. “I found my thing: openness,” she wrote. “I decided that’s what God wanted me to do. . . . I was going to make people feel better about their insides by showing them mine.”
God—at least, the version she had in mind back then—is not much of a presence in “Untamed,” but radical honesty is still focal. The book begins with the story of a trip to the zoo, during which Doyle and her family encounter a tamed cheetah named Tabitha. She imagines what the animal would tell her, if it could talk: “ ‘I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this.’ . . . She’d sigh and say, ‘I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist.’ I’d say: Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddam cheetah.”
Each of Doyle’s books has reached the top of the best-seller lists. “Untamed” has sold more than two million copies. After reading it, the singer Adele posted, “It’s as if I just flew into my body for the very first time.” Oprah Winfrey called Doyle one of the “awakened leaders who are using their voices and talent to elevate humanity.” The Biden campaign sought Doyle’s help reaching suburban women: “Glennon is their knight in shining armor,” a campaign staffer said. Doyle’s books aren’t memoirs of extraordinary experience—she is not a Kenyan-American who goes on to become President, or the daughter of a flamboyant con artist, or a survivor of a wrenching immigration. But Doyle, who sometimes refers to herself as a “clinically depressed motivational speaker,” has a knack for distilling wisdom from seemingly incompatible sources—radical feminism, evangelical Christianity, twelve-step programs, Pema Chödrön—into an easy-drinking blend. Everything will be better, she suggests, if you just tell the truth about yourself.
Between Doyle’s first book and her third, her truth has changed considerably. “Carry On, Warrior” honors women committed to slogging through the muck of domesticity. “Untamed” argues that if women would just gnaw their way out of the cages of societal expectation they’d be goddam cheetahs. “My world view is, of course you should be changing, but it’s become clear to me that that’s not everybody’s world view,” she told me. “Some of the criticism I’ve read about ‘Untamed’ is: Does the fact that she’s so different in this book mean that her other books were lies?” Not many writers have more than one memoir in them, but Doyle has had more than one life. “To write a new book,” she told me, “I always feel like I have to become a new person.”
Years ago, at one of Doyle’s readings, a reporter approached her father and said, “You must be so proud of your daughter.” Doyle’s father, a middle-school principal and football coach, replied, “Honestly, we’re just happy she’s not in jail.” Before she was a lesbian or a Christian or an author or an influencer, Doyle had a different incarnation, one that is crucial to her canon: the fuckup.
Growing up in Burke, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., Doyle was admired for her looks. “She is such a beautiful child, strangers say to my mother daily,” Doyle wrote in “Love Warrior,” her second memoir. “I have to learn what to do because beauty is a responsibility.” At ten years old, she started binging and purging: “Each night I bring two cups to bed with me—one filled with food and one to fill with vomit. I leave the cups underneath my bed, and their stench is a constant reminder to all of us that I’m not better.” Doyle was raised in a Catholic family that valued service and humility; a poster in her father’s office said “don’t get too proud, the size of your funeral will likely depend on the weather.” She describes herself as loved and unhurt but still desperately out of place on planet Earth.
After nearly a decade of battling bulimia, she entered a psychiatric hospital during her senior year of high school. “For the first time in my life, I found myself in a world that made sense to me,” Doyle said at a ted talk in 2013. “In the mental hospital, there was no pretending: the jig was up.” But the suffering was not. While attending James Madison University, Doyle found camaraderie in her sickness. “There are so many openly bulimic women in my sorority that there is an announcement one afternoon,” she writes. “ ‘When you throw up, please flush the toilets. It looks bad when people come to the house and there’s puke everywhere.’ ”
She began drinking ferociously, at frat parties where there were signs on the wall that said “no fat chicks”: “There I can drink myself into a stupor and be carried to bed to have sex that I will not remember.” When she was not attending these festivals of misogyny and dissipation, she was preparing for them. “The process begins at around four o’clock when I’m steady enough to get out of bed and begin drinking again,” she writes. “Then I dry off and gather my tools—hair dryer, straightener, makeup, stilettos, tube top, short skirts, more beer—and begin the hard work of transforming myself from a sick mess into my shiny, beautiful, bulletproof rep.” (She means this in the sense of “sales rep.”)
After Doyle graduated, she became a third-grade teacher. She loved her students, but every day after class she drove to the store for “two huge bottles of wine.” One weekend, at a bar crawl in Washington, D.C., Doyle was reintroduced to Craig Melton, a high-school classmate. He was, she recalled, “a star soccer player with all the wholesomeness and goldenness that soccer coaches require or create.” (Doyle has a thing about soccer players.) He was also handsome enough to work as a model. They became drinking buddies and lovers, and, four months later, Doyle had an abortion. “After that night, I don’t stop drinking often enough to maintain a life,” she writes. She missed work; she abandoned her car while on a bender; she was arrested—“only five times.”
On Mother’s Day, 2002, she discovered that she was pregnant again, but this time she had a revelation. “I am a drunk. I am a bulimic. I cannot love a child, because all I do is hurt the people I love. I cannot teach someone else how to live because I am only half alive. There is no one on earth, including me, who’d consider me worthy of motherhood. And yet. As I stare at the little blue cross, it is impossible for me to deny that someone decided I was worthy,” she writes. “I decide to believe in a God who believes in a girl like me.”
This marked the emergence of Doyle’s second literary iteration: the believer. She believed in matrimony, and she believed in motherhood; she and Melton got married and had a son, Chase. Two more children followed quickly, both of them girls (“until they tell me otherwise,” as Doyle puts it these days). She believed in a loving, forgiving, Mary-centered version of Christianity, and in her twelve-step program, both of which emphasized surrender. Perhaps above all else she believed in integrity. “I wanted to be perfect—because I had spent my whole life pissing people off and disappointing people and making people very, very sad,” she told me.
She sought redemption through conventional channels: “I’ll start going to church and I’ll marry this guy and I will quit my job and stay home and figure out how to make baskets out of papers.” But with three small children it was difficult to get to twelve-step meetings, and so she lost her sole outlet for expression. It is this avatar of Doyle’s—the housebound warrior, carrying on—who started regularly e-mailing friends her impassioned, essayistic impressions of life. “I was just dying for a place to tell the truth,” she said. “I would send them the e-mails, and then I would check up: ‘Did you have any time to think about the things that I was talking about?’ But they were at work.”
Eventually, one of her friends responded with a link to a tutorial on how to start a blog. Doyle began getting up at four-thirty, to write before her children were out of bed. She told stories from her darkest days, or made extended metaphors out of the mundane experiences of motherhood. One of the first posts to go viral was “Don’t Carpe Diem,” about the impossibility of savoring every second of her children’s lives. “I’d be at Target, or wherever, and one of my kids would be breaking down, and some older woman would come over and say, ‘Every precious minute goes so fast!’ ” Doyle recalled. “And I’d never had a moment feel longer.” Threaded through her writing were slogans and terms that she coined (and often capitalized) to soothe and inspire her readers—a technique borrowed from her football-coach father which was later reinforced by church and by A.A. (Doyle has retained this habit: in “Untamed,” she refers to the process of finding profound truths by intuition as “the Knowing.”) Momastery drew an overwhelming response from (predominantly white, Christian, female) readers, who saw their secret selves reflected in Doyle’s work.
“Carry On, Warrior,” built around her most popular blog posts, was a celebration of persistence in marriage, of the grace to be found in domestic routine. Just as the galleys were going to press, Doyle learned that her husband had been having one-night stands for more than a decade. “While I’ve been home changing diapers, doing dishes, and feeding our children, he’s been sleeping with other women,” she wrote later. “While I’ve been apologizing for my inability to connect during sex, he’s been connecting with strangers.”
If this revelation undermined Doyle’s first book, it provided the foundation of her second. “Love Warrior” is the story of how Doyle reconfigured her marital crisis as an opportunity for transformation. “The invitation in this pain is the possibility of discovering who I really am,” she wrote. “Death and resurrection—maybe that’s just the way of life and love.”
Oprah Winfrey selected “Love Warrior” for her book club, and Doyle’s publisher braced for a marriage-redemption blockbuster. Once again, though, the release of a book coincided with a life-altering experience: at a publishing event, she met Wambach, a two-time Olympic gold medallist and a World Cup champion, who was promoting her own memoir. “Suddenly, a woman is standing where nothingness used to be. She takes up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe,” Doyle wrote. “I stare at her and take inventory of my entire life. My whole being says: There She Is.” And then they were stuck, feeling all the feelings, from opposite coasts, in two separate marriages.
“It was absolutely brutal,” Doyle said, one afternoon when she and Wambach were sitting in the bright living room of their house, in Naples, Florida. There were palm trees out by the pool; inside, the furniture was modern and mostly white, and on the wall were paintings by an artist from Wambach’s native Rochester—caricatures of Bob Dylan and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two famous shape-shifters. “I thought, This is my one shot at happiness,” Doyle continued. “And I will never be able to take it.”
Their first e-mails were about recovery; Wambach was one month sober, after a D.U.I. that made headlines. “My face was on the ESPN ticker for a whole week,” Wambach said, ruefully. “That public shaming just knocked it right out of me.” She was living in Portland, Oregon, and was in the process of separating from her wife, Sarah Huffman, a former teammate on the WNY Flash. The two were celebrated for exchanging a passionate kiss in the stands following Wambach’s win at the Women’s World Cup in 2015—a moment of public pride, just a week after a Supreme Court ruling effectively legalized marriage equality. Doyle had never kissed a woman before.
At first, Wambach said, “I was protecting myself, on a soul level. Because they never leave the family, straight women. They never leave the man—you know, like, for me.” But Doyle’s background turned out to be an advantage. “When Glennon started to talk Jesus and Christianity to my mother,” Wambach continued, “Mom was kind of taken aback that, Oh, this person knows more about this subject that I have basically been using as the reason why my daughter should not be with women.”
Doyle does not like to label her sexuality. On Instagram this fall, she posted a photo of a new haircut and wrote, “I like it short and unruly and wild and not so straight—just like me.” In her living room, she asked, “Who’s the boss of what’s a lesbian? And what’s bisexual? I do not feel like I was hiding something for my whole life. I really understand why the ‘born this way’ narrative is important to so many people, but to me it smacks of guilt and shame. It’s, like, ‘Oh, I would be straight if I could, but I can’t.’ Can you imagine if we had that in the civil-rights movement? If Black people were, like, ‘I would be white if I could’?”
Doyle wears a gold pendant of Mary on her neck, and she played with it with her manicured fingers as she spoke. “I have been in and out of Christian circles for so long that I know all of that culture, that language,” she said. “It’s all semantics. Abby talks about leadership with a team, and to me it means the exact same thing as what I talk about in terms of faith. When I say that I’m obsessed about Jesus, what I love so much is the idea of showing up for the world in a way that is sacrificial.” Wambach was that kind of leader, Doyle said, much more than she was: “I am not my favorite kind of person.”
In Doyle’s defense, Wambach suggested that, in effect, the political is personal: “Because of her size, because of her gender, because of her pretty face, in order to get her way she has to go into an alternative mode! Otherwise, she will be walked over and talked over and never get things done.”
“Listen, it’s not like I’m walking around shooting people,” Doyle said. “I’m a good and kind person. I don’t know if I’m nice. Would you say I’m nice?”
“I think you are in your heart,” Wambach replied, which made them both laugh. “I have to remember that you have clinical anxiety, right? And it’s not fair for me to be, like, Why don’t you respond nicer? So it forces me to be emotionally intelligent!”
“See?” Doyle said. “She’s my favorite kind of person.”
Doyle and Wambach are the embodiment of what straight women have in mind when they say that it would be so much easier to be in love with another woman. They exist in what Doyle calls a “forever conversation—the way I always dreamed it could be.” At this point, their relationship provides as much fodder for Doyle’s work as motherhood and spirituality do. Whenever they find themselves on the verge of a certain kind of interaction, one of them whips out a phone to record it. “You know when you’re, like, ‘Oh, here we go again’? Each of us knows when it’s coming, and this is part of our online story.” They have been approached about doing a television series. “Probably once a week for the last four years, some network has written to us begging for us to do a reality show, and never, ever, in a million gazillion years would we,” Doyle said. “We do a slice of that, but all on our own terms.” Reality television relies on people acting out. Wambach and Doyle are done with all that. They prefer Instagram, where people go to see something that they can aspire to.
Initially, Doyle was told that admitting she’d fallen in love with Wambach—just as she was about to go on tour promoting “Love Warrior”—would be career suicide. “There is fear and panic,” she posted on Momastery. “And the advice from many is: Wait, G. Just wait till after the book has launched to reveal this. This is a MARRIAGE book—you can’t break up before it even comes out!” But, she explained to her readers, “I was not called to be successful. I was called to be faithful. I was called to be faithful to truth and vulnerability and to YOU.”
Every weekday morning at nine, Doyle has a Zoom meeting with her team back in Virginia: Dynna Cabana, who is in charge of events and operations; Allison Schott, who handles graphic design; and Doyle’s sister, Amanda, whom she describes as “the boss of me.” (“Glennon thinks in colors,” Amanda, a lawyer, said. “I think in spreadsheets.”) One morning, the four women were discussing Doyle’s recent appearance on Hillary Clinton’s podcast, which they intended to promote on her social-media platforms. “She said, I really need you to call me Hillary, and I was, like, I really need you to have a different request of me,” Doyle said. “I can’t even call my eighth-grade civics teacher Tina.”
“But she’s doing that for likability, right?” Amanda asked.
“No! We had a really beautiful conversation, and she was really vulnerable and precious, and it was, like, a moment.”
Doyle was concerned about how her followers might respond to Clinton’s podcast. “I was up at 2 a.m. thinking about this,” she said. “When we post it, I want this to be a completely safe space for her. Like, if one person says one freaking thing . . . ”
“That will one hundred per cent happen,” Amanda said, nodding vigorously. “Less so on Instagram, but on Facebook you might want to consider just turning off the comments.”
This would be a big step in the Doylesphere; she considers the back-and-forth with her readers sacrosanct. “I’m always amazed by my friends who are writers online who say, ‘Why are you reading comments?’ ” she told me. “It’s, like, That is half the thing!” For Doyle—who has written, “I love people, but not in person”—the Internet provides an ideal medium. Online, the exchanges are immediate, and building fellowship can seem effortless. (Publishing, by contrast, feels to her like “idea generation in molasses.”) She communicates with her readers almost daily, in tones as intimate as if she were talking to dear friends. She often begins videos by saying, “Hello, loves.” A habitual sign-off is “I love us,” or, if she’s responding to something bad, “We will get through this together, like we always have.”
“I just feel so indebted to them,” Doyle told me. “It feels like a very good use of my life and time to keep guiding my little community, because they actually can make change.” She and Amanda started the nonprofit Together Rising in 2012, and since then have raised more than twenty-eight million dollars for causes that have gripped Doyle’s followers: Syrian refugees, children separated from their parents at the border, incarcerated Black mothers who can’t afford to post bail, a single mom who needs breast-cancer treatment. A mantra of the organization is “Transform your heartache into action.” In their living room, Wambach suggested that this idea had a persistent place in their lives. “You see something wrong, you feel it,” she told Doyle. “Like, you’re in bed for two days when kids are getting locked up in cages—and I’m, like, Where’s my wife? And then one day I wake up, and you’re out of bed, you’ve got an easel, and you’re ready to take down the whole system.”
In addiction recovery, the Serenity Prayer encourages people to change what they can and accept what they can’t; Doyle has reëvaluated where that line is. If you abide by her catchphrase and “feel everything,” you may well find yourself moved by the suffering of others. Another of her catchphrases might inspire you to work against it: “We can do hard things.” Doyle came across the maxim when she taught third grade, noticing it on a sign in another teacher’s classroom. Since she started using it in her writing, it has resonated broadly. After Biden won the Presidency, his campaign manager tweeted, “We can do hard things . . . and you just did!” Addressing Congress after the siege of the Capitol, Chuck Schumer said, “In America, we do hard things.” A flurry of comments erupted online. An Instagram follower of Doyle’s commented, “Schumer is Untamed!” Another wrote, “I might have started crying,” to which Doyle responded, “me too :)” There were a great many cheetah emojis. As the conversation continued, Doyle offered a comforting wish: “Just an idea for us: maybe we all go to bed a little early . . . to extra prepare us for whatever comes tomorrow? I love us. We can do hard things.”
Doyle’s good friend Elizabeth Gilbert—who also rose to fame with a memoir about self-actualization, and who addresses her followers as “dear ones” online—explained the connection. “I don’t want to pathologize, but we might have some teensy boundary issues, and some history of not being able to tell where I end and the other person begins,” she said. Gilbert defended the relationships as real, though: “People will say, ‘I feel like I know you,’ and what I tend to say to them is, ‘Well, you do—that’s not an insane thing for you to think. I’ve quite literally told you everything.’ ” She added, “If you’ve come this far with me in my—I hate the word—journey, and you’ve stuck with me, then I kind of know you, too.”
Doyle has, of course, become another kind of believer now: the social-justice warrior. “Untamed” consists of sixty-five chapters, each with a staccato title—“Racists,” “Girl Gods,” “Sandcastles,” “Blow Jobs”—and each told swiftly enough to be shared on Facebook. “I think one of the reasons ‘Untamed’ did so well is because the chapters are short, and people could handle it with their traumatized covid brains,” Doyle told me. Her stories function as parables, offering reassurance and implicit advice for a good life: defy the patriarchy, stand against white supremacy, honor your intuition. If, like A.A. slogans or catechism, Doyle’s shibboleths are simplistic, they are also a kind of lifeline for many. “Something you always hear in twelve-step rooms is that religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell, and spirituality is for people who have already been there,” Gilbert said. “Most of the people who follow both of us have been to Hell—or are in it.”
Adrienne Elrod, who was the Biden campaign’s director of surrogate strategy and operations, reached out to Doyle after taking an informal poll of women she knew, asking whose endorsement would influence them most. “It was mind-blowing,” Elrod said. “Didn’t matter if you were a friend I went to high school with in Arkansas who never got a degree, or my sorority sister who’s a suburban mom living outside of Dallas. Glennon Doyle—they hang on her every word.” Many weren’t even Democrats, Elrod said; they just trusted Doyle. “Most of them are politically agnostic—maybe they even have Fox News on every evening. They are in their forties, the kids are about to go to college, a lot of them are stay-at-home moms or are working in jobs they don’t love. And they feel like, We need someone to tell us what the meaning of life is and give us reassurance that we’re more than just moms.”
Though Doyle sees herself as a leader, she bristles at the term “guru,” which the media often apply to her. “I earn trust from these people hearing about their everyday needs, and I am endlessly fascinated by that—how to deal with our emotions and relationships, that’s my jam,” she said. “A guru is someone who’s getting people to follow them. I’m trying to get people to feel more activated in their own lives.”
After “Carry On, Warrior,” Doyle contemplated a career as a minister, and was accepted to Chicago Theological Seminary. “But I was talking to my eighth-grade civics teacher, Mrs. Yalen, this ridiculously fiery Jewish woman, who taught me everything about being involved with democracy,” she said. “And she was, like, You already have a church—it just doesn’t have walls.”
Doyle isn’t even sure she identifies as a Christian anymore. “Sometimes I look back on the Christian-ese I used to use, and I can’t even recognize it,” she said. “But there’s a lot about the actual, Biblical character Jesus that I’m obsessed with.” She added, “If I were going to write a story now about what love would do if it walked around on Earth, I would make it a baby from the most oppressed, most marginalized group. I would make Jesus, like, a transgender Black woman.”
For every reader who has been put off by Doyle’s evolution, there are many more who have been entranced by it; her online following has doubled since the publication of “Untamed.” “When she fell in love with Abby, it’s not like her audience defected,” the author and activist Luvvie Ajayi Jones said. She and Doyle became friends about four years ago. “She still had this really big evangelical audience then—she represented the woman who believed in God in a way that was palatable to them. But then she started speaking truth to power, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, shoot! I came here for one thing, but I’m going to stay for this other thing.’ ” After the murder of George Floyd, Ajayi Jones and Doyle collaborated with the Netflix executive Bozoma Saint John on an Instagram campaign called #ShareTheMicNow, in which white celebrities handed their social-media accounts over to Black women.
Doyle thinks that her community is there to be decent together, in the same place, at the same time. “It’s like what people like about church,” she said. During quarantine, people have turned online for connection, a sense of belonging. Doyle has been getting those things out of a computer for years. At a time in her life when she felt lonely and isolated, the people who commented on her blog posts gave her solace. She contemplated this phenomenon in “Love Warrior,” and concluded that she and her ex-husband had something in common—they were not so different, the blogger and the adulterer: “Through strangers on a screen, I’ve found the intimacy I yearned for. We both have.”
Running errands one afternoon, Wambach ordered a strawberry milkshake. Doyle did not. Back home, Doyle put the milkshake in the fridge for Wambach, who returned to find it reduced by a third. “I saw you grab it, and I knew what was going to happen,” Wambach told Doyle. “It just settled,” Doyle replied unconvincingly, pacing their kitchen. Wambach asked, “Do you think that there will ever be a time when you can just order your own?” Doyle shook her head, then tried another tack: “That milkshake was freaking thirteen dollars! Who orders a thirteen-dollar milkshake?” Wambach—who was filming the interaction on her phone—was outraged. “I do,” she said. “Guess what? I get to do whatever I want. And you get to do whatever you want.” Doyle, giggling, made one last attempt: “That just seems so individualistic and mean.” Ultimately, she apologized. The women proffered their undying love. Wambach posted the video on Instagram, where it was enjoyed by four hundred and eighty-four thousand people.
Doyle said that they shared the video as a kind of teachable moment. Like Gloria Steinem, another feminist whose beauty made her message of liberation from the patriarchy’s aesthetic more appealing to women who still wanted to embody it, Doyle has struggled persistently with eating. “In my weird times, a lot of my thoughts are about, What should I eat? What shouldn’t I? Is that too much? How much am I working out?” she said. “Everything in me intellectually knows what a freaking opportunity cost it is—the things that I could do with that energy, in that brain space! It’s, like, the one program I can’t get out of my floppy disk.”
Until recently, Doyle dutifully dyed and straightened her long, blond hair and cultivated the plastic glamour of a Disney princess. Pointing at her chin-length, naturally curly hair, she said, “Even this is a big deal for me.” She has given up Botox and sometimes goes on camera without makeup. “When someone says to me, ‘You’re pretty,’ the only thing that means to me is ‘Our culture has a list of things that deems people attractive, and you are really good at kicking your own ass to match those standards. Congratulations,’ ” she said. “It’s the same way people will say, ‘There’s no way you can have an eating disorder, look how thin you are.’ Like, why do you think I’m so thin? Because I have a raging eating disorder, you freaking asshole!” She shook her head. “I would not at all be surprised if I’m this ninety-year-old badass woman who’s done a lot of good things and is still, like, I’ll just have a quarter of a cookie.”
Doyle has always thought of herself as a feminist, but she’s not sure it’s a club that wants her for a member. “I think feminism has a hard time being inclusive of a lot of things that I am,” she said. “My femme presentation. My high-pitched voice.” Doyle fired an agent who insisted that she speak lower and slower in interviews. “She kept saying, ‘No one’s going to take you seriously.’ ” Doyle recorded the audio version of “Untamed,” and it became one of the year’s most downloaded audiobooks.
“It’s not just hard-core feminists who I feel are begrudgingly allowing me a seat at the table,” she continued. “Same thing with L.G.B.T.Q. activists—I’m not gay enough for the gay community.” Doyle has got blowback for refusing to reframe her story as a life spent in the closet. “Also, you know who else won’t let me at any tables? Christians!” The writer Jen Pollock Michel argued in Christianity Today that Doyle “sermonizes that God’s love is so boundless that her choices need no bounds.” Real Christianity, Michel wrote, does not entail “abandoning the discomfort of God’s revealed truth for self-soothing versions that placate the conscience and tickle our fancy.”
Doyle, despite her huge following, often feels displaced. “I’m not used to belonging,” she told me. Even her neighborhood in Florida seems inhospitable these days. Her house, which abuts a canal leading to the Gulf of Mexico, is one of just a few there without a Trump sign. “We look out at our back yard, and there’s boat after boat with Trump flags,” Doyle said. “It’s not conservative. It’s like we live inside a rally.”
“We can have good surface conversations at soccer,” Wambach said, coming into their kitchen one evening. “We love their kids, and they love ours. But I think that, by necessity, it’s forced us to just kind of keep to ourselves.” They were getting ready for an early dinner before soccer practice. Both daughters, Amma and Tish, play. “But nobody loves soccer more than Craig,” Doyle said. “Including this one,” she added, pointing to Wambach.
“He’s a lover,” Wambach agreed. “I was just good at it.”
Wambach, Doyle, and Craig Melton are good friends who “parent like a braid,” Doyle likes to say. The three of them, and their children, recently decided to move to Los Angeles. The move is partly to do with work. Wambach and Doyle are investors in the Angel City Football Club, a newly established team in the National Women’s Soccer League, and Doyle is collaborating on a script for a television series based on “Untamed,” which is being developed by J. J. Abrams’s production company. Perhaps most of all, they are tired of being so isolated. Asked what she wouldn’t miss about Naples, Tish, who is fourteen, said immediately, “The Republicans.”
Doyle, who was wearing peach pants and a white tank top, led the family in a rendition of “The Lord Is Good to Me,” and then distributed burgers, veggie for Chase and regular for everyone else. She asked, “What is the single thing that is not a person that you will miss about Naples?”
“Do they have smoothies in California?” Amma asked her.
Doyle told her they definitely did: “I don’t even think they have solid food.”
In Los Angeles, Doyle may finally find that she belongs. Her friend Chelsea Handler, the comedian, told me, “All my friends in Hollywood read ‘Love Warrior.’ And ‘Untamed’—this time, everyone knew about her.” In June, Wambach and Doyle were looking at houses in the L.A. suburbs, and, for the first time, Doyle encountered “Untamed” “in the wild,” as she put it. “We were waiting for the realtor on this tiny, precious tree-covered street,” she recalled. “And this woman walks out of her house and says, ‘Are you Glennon? I’m literally sitting on my front porch finishing “Untamed” right now, and I looked up and you’re standing in the middle of my street.’ ” Doyle grinned. “I said, ‘Yes, I come to everybody’s house. I’m just here in case you want to talk about anything.’ ” ♦
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