Untamed

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Themes

The Power of Inner Knowing

Doyle defines “the Knowing” as an internal stillness not reliant on external factors or voices. She turns towards this Knowing in the aftermath of her husband’s infidelity as she struggles to decide whether to leave him. After searching for an answer through her friends and even on the Internet, Doyle is inspired to incorporate daily moments of silence after receiving a card from a friend with the message to “Be Still and Know.” Through these small moments of stillness, Doyle builds a longer and more integrated process that she carries throughout the memoir. As she maneuvers through the obstacles of bulimia, addiction, and infidelity, Doyle turns to her Knowing to guide her and forge a path of self-reliance.

Doyle encourages this sense of Knowing not only in her readers but also in her children, particularly her daughters. Though her own experiences as a woman, Doyle investigates the ways in which women specifically abandon their Knowing to adhere to the social conditioning that permeates their lives. Doyle learns to distrust the pervading societal messages about what it means to be a woman, which allows her to connect to her Knowing and make the decision to pursue a relationship with Abby.

Previously associated with Christianity, Doyle distinguishes the Knowing from a rigid understanding of God or a higher power. She chooses instead to focus on interacting with one’s Knowing no matter one’s choice of label. Doyle writes, “It doesn’t matter what we call our Knowing. What matters—if we want to live our singular shooting star of a life—is that we call it” (59). In her memoir, Doyle chronicles how she endures excommunication from multiple churches after leaving her marriage and beginning a romantic relationship with Abby. As a result of following her Knowing, Doyle’s relationship with Christianity shifts as she redefines faith as “not a public allegiance to a set of outer beliefs, but a private surrender to the inner Knowing” (75). Doyle no longer places God in the center of her life and instead chooses to honor herself. She cements this devotion to the inner self as divine in her Epilogue as she adapts a poem from a holy text to demonstrate her own continuing evolution.

Society’s Influence on Gender

Through a blend of personal stories and detailed research, Doyle chronicles the ways in which both men and women develop under the unavoidable influence of society. Conditioned under society’s expectations of masculinity and femininity, both men and women struggle to evolve under the intense pressures of social acceptance. Doyle’s first exposure to her social conditioning begins at the age of ten when she begins her journey with bulimia and attempts to form herself into the ideal woman. Doyle quickly learns that, “All of the things that make a woman human are a good girl’s dirty secret” (5). To quell the wild nature inside of her, Doyle turns to alcohol and drugs. Even after working towards sobriety at the age of twenty-six, Doyle then turns to her role as a mother, wife, and Christian to tame herself into the ideal mother.

To demonstrate the messages she and all women receive, Doyle uses the image of a memo. In Part 2, Doyle introduces the concept of the memo and discusses the path to freedom found in burning the memos provided by society. Doyle finds freedom in unlearning the conditioning that afflicts her and all women as she learns to unbecome “a mother slowly dying in her children’s name and became a responsible mother: one who shows her children how to be fully alive” (74). Doyle is able to free herself from this memo of motherhood by dissolving her traditional family unit in favor of a relationship with Abby.

Doyle continues to witness the effect of societal gender roles in her own children. Although she attempts to defend her daughters against this conditioning, she realizes that her son, too, suffers under the burdens of manhood. After realizing her neglect of recognizing her son’s conditioning, Doyle declares, “I do not want him to surrender to cages he must slowly die inside or kill his way out of. I do not want him to become another unconscious brick that power uses to build fortresses around itself” (166). Doyle calls her readers to action and encourages them to “get comfortable allowing our men to gently and consistently express the pain of being human, so that violent release isn’t their go-to option…Let us—men, women, and all those in between or beyond—reclaim our full humanity” (170).

Cycles of Death and Rebirth

Doyle represents the evolving nature of humanity through repeated images of death and rebirth. She states, “Rebirth means death. Once a truer, more beautiful vision is born inside us, life is in the direction of that vision” (74). Throughout her memoir, Doyle captures moments of rebirth where she, and those she documents, can break free from an older vision of themselves in the hopes of building a new life. With these scenes of rebirth, Doyle relays the loss of an older self.

For Doyle, this older self is one who numbs and distracts herself from feeling the full weight of her emotions. In her new enlightened self, Doyle allows herself to feel as “my daily reminder to let myself burn to ashes and rise, new” (53). Here, she uses the imagery of the phoenix to convey the ways in which humanity is defined by its cyclical nature. The evolving nature of humanity allows for the nuance of multiple deaths and rebirths to usher in new identities and experiences. Doyle expresses her desire to live a wild life of death and rebirth when she states, “I am a human being, meant to be in perpetual becoming. If I am living bravely, my entire life will become a million deaths and rebirths” (77).