Untamed
2020
- women, united states, biography
- christian women
- christian life
- happiness
- nyt:combined-print-and-e-book-nonfiction=2020-03-29
- lgbtq biography and memoir
The story
In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.
What it’s like
Warm, candid and unhurried, with the intimate pull of a long letter read aloud by a friend who has finally stopped apologising for herself. The prose is conversational and confessional, full of short declarative sentences, sudden italicised bursts of emphasis, and self-deprecating asides that make a heavy subject feel like kitchen-table talk. Scenes of domestic life, from carpools and cluttered counters to the sharp quiet of a marriage in crisis, arrive in vivid, ordinary detail, and the emotional register swings between tender humour and raw grief without ever going cold. The pacing is loose and circling, returning again and again to the same question of who a woman is when she stops performing for others, so it suits a slow weekend morning, a long train journey, or a late night when you want to feel understood rather than instructed. Intensity is low: there is no violence or gore, and sexual content is handled frankly but never explicitly, while painful subjects such as addiction, infidelity and family rupture are described with candour and emotional weight. It is for readers who want the comfort of hearing another woman's hard-won honesty about joy, faith, and self-trust, especially those who came of age inside expectations that never fit.
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