Love Warrior
A Memoir
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4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
#1 New York Times Bestseller | Oprah's Bookclub 2016 Selection
"Riveting…a worthy investment…this book has real wisdom."
—New York Times Book Review
"Provocative….I adore her honesty, her vulnerability, and her no-nonsense wisdom, and I know you will, too."
—Oprah Winfrey
The highly anticipated memoir by bestselling author Glennon Doyle, Love Warrior tells the story of her journey of self-discovery after the implosion of her marriage.
Just when Glennon Doyle Melton was beginning to feel she had it all figured out—three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list—her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed. A recovering alcoholic and bulimic, Glennon found that rock bottom was a familiar place. In the midst of crisis, she knew to hold on to what she discovered in recovery: that her deepest pain has always held within it an invitation to a richer life.
Love Warrior is the story of one marriage, but it is also the story of the healing that is possible for any of us when we refuse to settle for good enough and begin to face pain and love head-on. This astonishing memoir reveals how our ideals of masculinity and femininity can make it impossible for a man and a woman to truly know one another—and it captures the beauty that unfolds when one couple commits to unlearning everything they’ve been taught so that they can finally, after thirteen years of marriage, commit to living true—true to themselves and to each other.
Love Warrior is a gorgeous and inspiring account of how we are born to be warriors: strong, powerful, and brave; able to confront the pain and claim the love that exists for us all. This chronicle of a beautiful, brutal journey speaks to anyone who yearns for deeper, truer relationships and a more abundant, authentic life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In her follow-up to 2013’s bestseller Carry On, Warrior, Glennon Doyle Melton confronts both her husband’s infidelities and her own demons. The popular “Momastery” blogger writes with great honesty, warmth, and spirit, so we weren’t surprised when Oprah picked Doyle Melton's book for her Book Club 2.0. It’s a spellbinding and moving account of one family’s journey away from certainty—and toward a more deliberate, meaningful future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this able, spiritual memoir, New York Times bestselling author Melton (Carry On, Warrior) inspires with her evolution from her alcoholic, bulimic, and promiscuous past, to today, when she feels on top of the world. When she becomes pregnant with her first child, she decides she's sick of living a half-dead life and stops drinking. She marries the father of her child and moves forward unsteadily until she finds her husband deep into porn and involved in one-night stands. She takes this as a cue to become a person that she can respect. She kicks her husband out, starts talking to God, goes into therapy, and practices yoga. In these activities she finds a series of insights that allow her to transform her life. Spiritual development is idiosyncratic, and Melton struggles to translate her experience into something universal. "You are love," she tells herself, and she's ecstatic at this discovery while the reader is floundering. But she writes well enough to create moments of accessible beauty. Women will want to reread passages that describe a return to intimacy with her similarly evolving husband and the speech she gives her young daughters about how sexiness is self-knowledge and self-respect, not stilettos and short skirts.
Customer Reviews
in awe
such a good book. touched home in so many ways!
Self-indulgent and not really about infidelity
I was disappointed in this book for several reasons: first of all, it's not about "forgiving his cheating heart" like the cover of Oprah's magazine teases us with. A more accurate teaser would've been "Shaken by infidelity: how would YOU react? One woman's journey to discover herself in the process of recovery." Because that's what the book is really about. She ends the book with an afterword where she says she's not sure they'll stay together. That was quite a downer. I was cheering for them and I think she wanted us to cheer for them and I felt like, "why'd she go and say that??" Kind of ruined it for me. I felt her husband was an admirable man for his remorse and how hard he was trying. How could she not forgive him??
I felt it was also certainly not a literary book at all with its juvenile style of present-tense writing and set-up. I didn't like all the detail about her bulimia (TMI) and since it was advertised as a story of infidelity, I kept wondering "when is she going to talk about her marriage?" It took over 100 pages to get there.
I do think she touches our collective nerve on how many of us go into marriage so broken and with such unreasonable expectations of ourselves and our mates. No wonder the divorce rate is so high. I think her most powerful message might be, "Fix yourself first. BEFORE you get married. And if you think you don't need fixing, that's proof that you do."
Want to like it
But couldn’t get myself there. Glennon holds a lot of knowledge and an interesting-ish story but the last hundred pages was her going on about what God is to her. It got very preachy and rambling.