How the self-help guru behind Adele's transformation earned a cult following

Adele credits this self-help book for her incredible transformation. Photo / Supplied

Sparks, apples, blow jobs, directions, polar bears, tick marks, algorithms. It reads like the next list of random nouns Donald Trump has memorised for the purpose of proving he's cognitively all there, but these are in fact the first few chapter titles of Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living – the part memoir, part self-help book that celebrities have been falling over themselves to recommend this year.

Reese Witherspoon, Oprah, Gwyneth Paltrow and Emma Watson have all included Glennon Doyle's tome on their lists of must-reads, but this weekend its latest A-list acolyte, Adele, offered what might be the most luminous review yet.

She took her praise to Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

If you’re ready - this book will shake your brain and make your soul scream. I am so ready for myself after reading this book! It’s as if I just flew into my body for the very first time. Whew! Anyone who has any kind of capacity to truly let go and give into yourself with any kind of desire to hold on for dear life - Do it. Read it. Live it. Practice it. We are a lot! But we are meant to be a lot! .. “A good life is a hard life!” Read this book and have a highlighter on hand to make notes because you’ll want to refer back to it trust me! I never knew that I am solely responsible for my own joy, happiness and freedom!! Who knew our own liberation liberates those around us? Cause I didn’t!! I thought we were meant to be stressed and disheveled, confused and selfless like a Disney character! ProBloodyFound!! You’re an absolute don Glennon ♥️

A post shared by Adele (@adele) on Aug 14, 2020 at 5:43pm PDT

The recommendation is perhaps the first official – there have been many unofficial – insight into Adele's radical transformation since her divorce from Simon Konecki (with whom she shares a 7-year-old son, Angelo) in September 2019.

A photograph posted on her 32nd birthday this year showed significant weight loss, the kind that sent fans and social media dwellers into a tailspin, and while she is expected to release a fourth album soon, she doesn't appear in an overwhelming hurry to finish it. Instead, it seems, she's done as the subtitle of her new favourite book urges and "stopped pleasing, started living".

The guide behind that principle is Untamed's author, Glennon Doyle, a 44-year-old former "Christian mummy blogger" turned behemoth of the "inspiration industry". Doyle describes herself as "an activist, speaker and thought leader", but she is also the founder of Together Rising, an all-women-led non-profit organisation that has raised more than $20 million for women, children and families in crisis, as well as the presenter of TED Talks, who appears on endless panels for the likes of Goop and Oprah, while managing her own one million Instagram followers.

Busy, then – as you might imagine of somebody who wrote a third memoir by her mid-forties. Raised in Virginia, Doyle's teens featured struggles with mental health issues and bulimia – the former becoming so acute that she spent time in a psychiatric hospital: her 2013 TEDx talk, "Lessons from the mental hospital" has been viewed some three million times – before becoming addicted to alcohol, drugs and food in early adulthood.

She got sober when she married former model Craig Melton in 2002. They had three children and moved to Florida, but Doyle became depressed, anxious and dissatisfied with life there. A devout Christian, she started a blog, Momastery, in which she vowed to "tell the truth" about motherhood. It gained a steady following until one essay, 'Don't Carpe Diem', went viral.

"Clearly, Carpe Diem doesn't work for me," Doyle wrote in it, "I can't even carpe 15 minutes in a row so a whole diem is out of the question."

People loved it. A book deal followed, 10 publishers squabbling for her signature, and Doyle's essay collection, Carry On, Warrior, debuted at number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. Things were looking up – until, just before she left for the book tour, Melton told his wife of 11 years that he had been cheating on her throughout their marriage. There had been many one night stands, he said, in addition to a porn addiction.

"The revelation of my husband's betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart," Doyle writes in Untamed. "I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot."

Glennon Doyle wrote the book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living. Photo / Getty Images

So she put pen to paper again. The next memoir, Love Warrior, told of how she and Melton saved their marriage, and had just been chosen as an Oprah's Book Club pick, when life had another twist. At an event on the book's publicity tour in 2016 (things always seem to happen to her on book tours), Doyle met Abby Wambach – a former captain of the USA women's football team, who was promoting her own memoir, Forward – and love struck.

"We couldn't have been a worse fit for each other," Wambach remembers of that meeting. "Glennon had a husband and three children and lived in Florida. I'd been sober for a month, my marriage [to fellow soccer player Sarah Huffman] was falling apart, I'd just left my soccer career of 30 years and I lived in Oregon."

Inconvenient, then, but with Melton and Huffman's blessing, the two women began a relationship and were married a year later. Wambach calls Melton's support for the marriage and her involvement with his children as "probably the most selfless act of grace or love I've ever experienced", while Melton – who, amazingly, once played football with Wambach long before his ex became her wife – said he "wanted to be the best role model I could, knowing there was some damage that was my fault in the relationship".

Sure was, Craig. And so now we have Untamed, the result of a rare case of a writer having enough material to fill a third memoir within a decade. Doyle and Wambach seem to be still living happily ever after, and the former's story of resilience, resolve, remarriage and other words beginning with "re–" have made her an icon in the inspiration-driven world of social media influencers.

Dr Brené Brown, speaker and author of the equally bestselling, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, is a friend. So is Liz Gilbert, who quite possibly kick-started the whole self-help phenomenon with her 2006 memoir, Eat Pray Love and also ended her heterosexual marriage in 2016 in order to marry a woman (Gilbert's late wife, Rayya Elias, died in 2018).

Some journalists joked, glibly, that another major drama would befall Doyle's personal life when Untamed was released last year. "I'm kind of scared because something big usually happens," she responded at the time. "I've finally gotten to the point where what I want for the future is more of what I have. Not something different."

Alas for some, it was launched and publicised without a hitch, and all Doyle did was further cement her status as a world leader in the multi-million-dollar inspiration industry. I had a flick through. The book is jaw-clenchingly earnest and saccharine in a way that only glossy American women who are heavy on eye contact, hugs and spirituality can get away with. But it is also surprisingly self-aware and inescapably galvanising – even to a professional cynic like me.

Not everyone has been through what Doyle has. In fact, I'm fairly certain only Doyle has been through what Doyle has. But many people could learn something from her. Clearly, that includes a reborn Adele.

"For every woman resurrecting herself. For the girls who will never be buried," the dedication to Untamed reads. Adele's fourth album, if and when it comes, probably won't hold back.

The words and wisdom of Glennon Doyle:

"When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself."

"The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that's no badge of honor."

"This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they've never been."

"Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right."

"Blessed are those brave enough to make things awkward, for they wake us up and move us forward."

"I will not stay, not ever again - in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself."

"The only thing that was wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me."

"Hard work is important. So are play and non-productivity. My worth is tied not to my productivity but to my existence. I am worthy of rest."