Authors Like Glennon Doyle

The writer who came before the whole genre Doyle works in. Lorde argued that a woman’s silence will not protect her, and she wrote about her body, her illness and her love for women in the first person decades before it was marketable. Read her for the political argument underneath the confessional memoir.

The clearest forerunner of Doyle’s voice: funny, profane and confessional about addiction, motherhood and an untidy faith. Both write short chapters that move from a domestic scene to a spiritual point. Lamott stays inside the church and is warier of handing out advice.

Untamed’s central image, a wild animal trained into obedience, is Estés’s argument in a single scene. Both books tell women that the self they were taught to hide is the one to trust. Estés works through stories and archetypes; Doyle works through her own life.

Lit and Love Warrior cover the same ground: drinking, a marriage under strain, motherhood and a faith found in recovery. Karr is a poet who writes harder, funnier sentences, and she distrusts tidy lessons, which makes her a good test of Doyle’s.

Strayed and Doyle were both chosen by the same revived Oprah’s Book Club, and both write about grief, a broken marriage and a woman deciding to remake her life. Tiny Beautiful Things is the closer match to Doyle’s advice voice; Wild to her memoirs.

Gilbert and Doyle both wrote bestsellers about leaving a marriage and choosing a different life, and both later wrote about falling in love with a woman. Gilbert is a storyteller and traveller; Doyle stays closer to home and draws a lesson from each scene.

Brown supplies a research vocabulary of shame, vulnerability and belonging for experiences Doyle describes from the inside. Readers who come to Doyle for the self-help rather than the memoir will find Brown more systematic and less personal.

Febos covers the same ground as Untamed, women unlearning what they were taught about their bodies and their desire, with a writer’s scepticism and much more research. She suits readers who want Doyle’s subject in longer, more searching essays.

Alderton shares Doyle’s confessional honesty about drinking, self-worth and love, but her centre of gravity is friendship rather than marriage or motherhood, and her tone is British and self-deprecating. A good bridge for younger readers.

The writer who complicates Doyle. Tolentino examines the culture of self-improvement and personal empowerment that books like Untamed sell into, and asks who profits from it. Read her alongside Doyle for the argument rather than the comfort.