Love Warrior

Product Information

If there was a picture of my life’s path you would see our footprints side by side and then you’d notice that one day I sat down in the sand and refused to travel any farther. I spent many years living as an “accidental” expat before becoming more intentional about my own global life.

She is smiling at me, and her fierce, steady eyes say: If you keep walking — I'm here to stand beside you.I wonder if the song’s length is part of its message: Life is not only eerie and hopeless but also entirely too long. Knowing her from Untamed and her podcast it's hard to hear the details only hinted at in those works, because I feel for her. My daughter was asking: How will I survive being this particular type of person in this particular type of world? There are so many openly bulimic women in my sorority that there is an announcement one afternoon, “When you throw up, please flush the toilets. Guys from a nearby fraternity occasionally hang a sign above their party room that reads: NO FAT CHICKS.

The process you must go through to “unbecome,” as Glennon describes it, so that you can connect with yourself, is a journey.Thirteen and a half years ago, I found myself on a cold bathroom floor–shaking from a ten-year hangover–staring at a pregnancy test like it was an eviction notice from my life. 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 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. By the end of the memoir, Melton believes she has “unbecome”—that she’s stripped away all the costumes she’s worn, enabling her true self to surface.But then Melton’s name popped up as a speaker in the latest Belong Tour, accompanied by other familiar names such as Jen Hatmaker, Shauna Niequist, and Nichole Nordeman. I’m sad that women are looking outside of the church to be discipled because they are starving for theological answers. There is a green lighter lying diagonally across the pack, and for a moment the lighter and cigarettes remind me of the two of us, tossed haphazardly on top of each other, meant to be of quick and practical use to one another. Essentially this means to shed the layers of what society has taught her about who she is and what she should be, and to embrace her true self instead.

It’s homecoming week at school and I’ve been nominated to the Homecoming Court and voted “Leading Leader” of my senior class. When she's dressed, we take turns leaning over and kissing her cheeks while she kicks and giggles — her arms jutting straight out from her sides like a starfish. When we reach the entrance, the ticket ladies smile, put their hands over their hearts, and say, "Aren't you three the most precious things? I just know that I am not beautiful, so anyone who says he loves me is saying it because it's in his contract. We'll get back to my wedding day and all the terrible magic that followed, but for now, let's begin at the beginning.

I leave the cups underneath my bed, and their stench is a constant reminder to all of us that I'm not better. I felt like I was right there with you in it and I remembered so powerfully my own loneliness and suffering, my own grief and renewal. When I’m fully armored, I head to the basement and stay up late with the boys and sleep in with the boys and I beat them in drinking contests and out-cocaine them line for line. IT'S AS IF SHE REACHED INTO HER HEART, CAPTURED THE RAW EMOTIONS THERE, AND TRANSLATED THEM INTO WORDS THAT ANYONE WHO'S EVER KNOWN PAIN OR SHAME CAN RELATE TO' OPRAH WINFREY, Oprah's Book Club 2016 selection 'EPIC' ELIZABETH GILBERT | 'BLEW ME AWAY' BRENE BROWNJust 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. I can tell she is trying to be brave, but no one knows what brave looks like inside this particular moment.