New Puritans like Doyle are creating echo chambers by encouraging their adherents to cut off family members and cancel their neighbors. Doyle doesn’t say that her mother was abusive or homophobic, but that she was worrying and calling her worry love. Doyle spends a great deal of emotional energy trying to get her mom to understand what Doyle knew in her bones: That this was the best, truest and most life-giving decision for herself and her family. In the chapter “Islands,” Doyle writes that her mother, who lives in another state, was having a hard time accepting her decision to divorce her husband and marry Wambach. New Puritans on the left and the right are creating echo chambers by encouraging their adherents to end friendships, cut off family members and cancel their neighbors on social media for wrong-think, or even ambivalence. Women do need to be reminded that it is okay to build a life that is very different from the life that their parents or their culture might have imagined for them.īut some of Doyle’s other ideas, like the notion that your nuclear or chosen family is an “island,” are symptomatic of a New Puritanism that is dividing our country.

She is at her best when encouraging women to model loving their lives instead of teaching their children by example that being a mother is about being miserable. I am a fan of Doyle’s old-school feminism. Spirituality is for people who’ve already been there.” She describes her Instagram followers as a “church,” while throwing shade at actual churches: “Religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Doyle’s ideas matter many people take them as gospel. It’s a good story and has been a New York Times bestseller for over 77 consecutive weeks. Doyle’s most recent memoir, Untamed, is about falling in love with the professional soccer star Abby Wambach, ending her unhappy marriage to Craig Melton and building a new life as a blended family. And she has a knack for tapping into the zeitgeist of progressive, white, female suburbia. Doyle is part memoirist, part life coach.

Untamed glennon