Books Like Untamed by Glennon Doyle (For People Ready to Live Differently)

Looking for books like Untamed by Glennon Doyle? These are the best books about living authentically — about shedding the performance and showing your real self to the world, with all the mess and courage that requires.

Glennon Doyle did something specific with Untamed. She didn't just write a memoir. She wrote a permission slip. Permission to stop being the version of yourself that other people are comfortable with and start being the version that actually feels like you. For a lot of readers — millions, as it turned out — that permission was the thing they'd been waiting for without knowing it.

The problem with permission slips is that they expire if you don't act on them. You finish Untamed, you feel the fire, and then Monday happens. The inbox fills up. The routines reassert themselves. The cage, it turns out, is comfortable in a way that freedom isn't.

These are the books that keep the fire lit. Not by repeating Doyle's message, but by approaching the same truth from different directions. Different voices, different metaphors, same destination: a life that's actually yours.

Untamed — Glennon Doyle (2020): A Quick Recap

Best for: The starting gun. The book that names the cage.

Doyle watches a cheetah at a zoo perform tricks for a crowd and recognizes herself: a wild thing trained to behave. The book that follows is part memoir, part manifesto — a systematic dismantling of every “should” that keeps people, especially women, performing instead of living. The writing is direct, the emotion is real, and the central metaphor lands like a train. If you haven't read it yet, start here. If you have, keep going.

My Dog Is Better at This Than Me — B.K. Larrikin (2026)

Best for: Untamed readers who want the same honesty with more humor and practical exercises.

Here's the thing about dogs: they are, by default, untamed. No one taught your dog to be present. No one gave your dog permission to feel joy without justifying it. No one had to write your dog a 300-page permission slip to stop performing. Your dog just... lives. And Larrikin built an entire book around the question: what if we paid attention to that?

Where Doyle names the cage, Larrikin shows you an animal who never got in one. Each chapter pairs a real story about a rescue dog named Rosie with a 3-minute exercise that makes the lesson stick. It's funnier than Untamed, more practical, and illustrated by Cael Morricone. The Chapter 5 shift from comedy to raw honesty about depression will remind you why you trusted Doyle in the first place: because the best writers earn their authority by being vulnerable first. Read the first chapter free or see all formats.

The Let Them Theory — Mel Robbins (2025)

Best for: Readers who need a practical framework for letting go of control.

Robbins takes the hardest lesson in Untamed — stop managing other people's perception of you — and gives it a dead-simple framework: let them. Let them misunderstand you. Let them be disappointed. Let them leave. And then redirect every ounce of energy you were spending on them back to yourself. It's Doyle's philosophy with a Robbins-style action plan bolted on.

Daring Greatly — Brené Brown (2012)

Best for: Readers who want the research behind why vulnerability is strength.

If Untamed is the permission slip, Brown's work is the research paper proving why the permission was necessary. Daring Greatly argues that vulnerability isn't weakness — it's the birthplace of connection, creativity, and courage. Brown brings two decades of qualitative research to back it up. Pair it with Doyle for the emotion and Brown for the evidence.

Brené Brown — whose TED talk on vulnerability has been viewed over 60 million times — spent twenty years researching the paradox at the center of books like these. As she writes in Daring Greatly: “Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives.” If Untamed gave you the courage to stop performing, these books continue the conversation.

Big Magic — Elizabeth Gilbert (2015)

Best for: Readers who want permission to create without waiting for perfect conditions.

Gilbert's argument is deceptively simple: creativity is not a luxury, it's a birthright. The fear that keeps you from creating — fear of judgment, failure, irrelevance — is the same fear that keeps you in Doyle's cage. Big Magic is lighter in tone than Untamed, more playful, and entirely unconcerned with whether the creative life looks productive from the outside. It's the book equivalent of your dog chasing a ball for the sheer joy of chasing a ball.

Year of Yes — Shonda Rhimes (2015)

Best for: Readers who need a concrete, time-bounded experiment in saying yes to their own life.

Rhimes — the woman who created Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and half of modern television — realized she'd been saying no to everything that scared her. So she spent a year saying yes. The results are funny, uncomfortable, and ultimately transformative in the way that only showing up for your own life can be. If Untamed is about naming what you want, Year of Yes is about what happens when you actually go get it.

What Should I Read After Untamed?

What Are the Best Books About Living Authentically?

If Untamed made you feel something, pick the book that matches what you need to do with that feeling. Need to laugh? My Dog Is Better at This Than Me. Need boundaries? The Let Them Theory. Need evidence? Brené Brown. Need creative courage? Gilbert. Need a year-long experiment? Rhimes. For the full list of funny options: Best Funny Self-Help Books of 2026. And if someone told you to read Manson's The Subtle Art instead, we have a whole list for that crowd too.

The best time to read the next book is before the fire from the last one goes out. Start with the one that won't let you go back to sleep — read the first chapter of My Dog Is Better at This Than Me for free and see if it keeps the door open.