Glennon Doyle
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Anonymous
” Oooh…spill the tea.. I need to know if my gut has been telling me the truth |
Anonymous
DP - not the one who knew her. I relate to Glennon because I also was a drunken, drugged up sorority girl who had trouble growing out of adolescence. I think there's probably someting toxic in her family, but haven't seen her talk/write about that? Glennon now says she is diagnosed anorexic whereas she thought she had recovered from bulimia. It tracks! She's honest. I think that women get jealous because she's cute, she's famous, she's rich now. They don't understand her, don't think she "deserves" it. She doesn't, really, put herself up as an expert. She shares her experience, her interpretation of her experience, and creates opportunities for (positve, constructive) thought and conversation. She's a unique person and I appreciate her. She followed her own path, at great risk, and found great reward. So, she is exceptional. She's never going to be perfect, but she made something great out of what she was dealt. Caveats: yes, she was dealt a hand of being white, blond, female, thin, pretty, prone to drug use, and eating disorders. She has major privilege and mundane challenges, way better off than most of the world, but Glennon did better with that than most people starting off the same. |
Anonymous
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I can't get on board with Glennon Doyle or influencers like her because I can never shake the feeling they are selling me an image of perfected imperfection. Glennon's like the poster child for this but there are a lot of influencers like this. I don't count Brene Brown in that group -- Brown talks about her own life experiences and her family sometimes, but her books/talks are focused on discussion of her research and most of her books focus on the experiences of people she has interviewed in order to draw broad conclusions about shame, vulnerability, communication, etc. She's not trying to create a cult of personality around herself, even if one has kind of developed anyway. I could find out tomorrow that Brown's marriage is falling apart and her kids hate her, and I don't think it would undermine anything I've learned from her. She's very trendy now, but most of the stuff of hers I've read is along the same lines as books I read by psychologists on stuff like healing from trauma or working through marital issues. It's based on collective and common experiences of many people.
Glennon is a different deal. I use the word influencer because it's accurate. She's selling you herself, her approach to life, her history, her relationship, her family. Initially she was selling traditional Christian motherhood and family, but you know, hip. Then she left her husband and married Abby, and now she's selling an image of a nontraditional family and life and she talks about co-parenting with Abby and her ex and dealing with her experience with meeting and falling for Abby. No issues with any of that as her story and experience, I just don't like how it's packaged and branded. I don't like that Abby is on her podcast or how public they are with their relationship, just like I didn't like it when she was writing Momastery and selling her hetero marriage in the same way. It feels fake. This will piss some people off, but Glennon Doyle is no different than, like, Rachel Hollis to me (the Girl Wash Your Face woman). These people have normal human experiences, draw a few weak initial conclusions, and then write entire books about them and build an empire around it. They don't know anything. They are no more qualified to talk about life than your neighbor or your kid's 2nd grade teacher or the guy who works at the bookstore near my house. There's no there there. I agree that at some point she and Abby will break up, and I think Glennon will write another book about how that experience taught her blah blah blah and she'll try to sell that version of herself too. How is this different than all the blonde momfluencers on Instagram trying to convince me they're "just like me" and then sell me Ruggables or whatever? It's not. It's a hustle and nothing more. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
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What I find curious about Glennon is that her issues are often associated with/blamed on a difficult childhood. But she seems to be close to her parents and sister, so I don't totally get it.
Oh, and no way are she and Abby going to last. |
Anonymous
+2 |
Anonymous
Thoughtful comment, yes the branding element, the packaging is wearying and tend to think without a great deal of maturity and self awareness, including the limits of her medium, it is likely feel empty/annoying over time. Because she is selling. There is also just a lack of stability that would alert the viewer and certainly the professional watching it. But the person themselves lacks the self awareness to see what they are truly revealing, so it's that tension that often feels uncomfortable, for me at least. And then I stop watching and listening. |
Anonymous
Do you have a link that would describe what you're talking about regarding Roxane Gay? What is her "Bad Art Friend behavior"? |
Anonymous
If Roxane Gay makes you uncomfortable, well, I think that's the point. She's not out here writing for most white women's comfort. |
Anonymous
Google the NYT story Bad Art Friend, read the story, read the comments, and then read the followups in other media that delve into all the sidestory and all the facts that the original NYT screwed up. Roxane is a bully and a liar. |
Anonymous
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“Glennon is a different deal. I use the word influencer because it's accurate. She's selling you herself, her approach to life, her history, her relationship, her family. Initially she was selling traditional Christian motherhood and family, but you know, hip. Then she left her husband and married Abby, and now she's selling an image of a nontraditional family and life and she talks about co-parenting with Abby and her ex and dealing with her experience with meeting and falling for Abby. No issues with any of that as her story and experience, I just don't like how it's packaged and branded. I don't like that Abby is on her podcast or how public they are with their relationship, just like I didn't like it when she was writing Momastery and selling her hetero marriage in the same way. It feels fake. “
Yes 🙌 thank you for articulating this. |
Anonymous
“Perfected imperfection” is such a brilliant way to sum up this genre! |
Anonymous
Hmm, okay. |
Anonymous
I have encountered other people like this in my life. They talk a lot about their childhood trauma and how it has impacted them, but then they also talk about their close, supportive relationships with their immediate family. It's confusing to me because I grew up in a dysfunctional family and we are not close and I definitely don't lean on them for support (nor would they give it if I tried). Of course there are families who may have worked through trauma and dysfunction and come out the other side. But there are degrees of dysfunction. My family members who abused me do not have the interest in or capacity for that kind of healing. I don't tend to talk super openly about my childhood trauma because (1) it would upset people and make them view me differently, and (2) while I have worked hard to process through it in therapy and I think done pretty well, it's still painful/hard to discuss very openly. I don't get the sense that Glennon and I have similar backgrounds or journeys. This is something that bothers me about this whole strain of "self help" actually. Glennon's whole "we can do hard things!" form of positivity doesn't really resonate with me because some of the hard things I've been through do not make for charming anecdotes about my resilience. Some of them are just sad. There isn't a lot of room for that in her particular brand of empowerment. |
Anonymous
Are you the same person you were at 16? Get over yourself. |