Glennon Doyle: «The‘ Any time was better ’only works for white and heteros men»

Cuando un periodista se acercó hace años al padre de Glennon Doyle y le dijo «debe de estar muy orgulloso de su hija», este lo miró y le respondió: «Si le digo la verdad, sencillamente nos alegramos de que no esté en la cárcel». Aquellos eran los días en los que Doyle (Burke, Virginia, EE UU, 45 años) ejercía de madre de tres hijos y de esposa devota. Era la época en la que triunfaba como escritora cristiana, aupada por el éxito de su blog Momastery y por narrar la maternidad creyente progresista en su primer libro de memorias, Carry on, warrior (2013, traducidas aquí como Guerrera del amor). Doyle había generado un provechoso culto femenino cristiano por abrirse en canal escribiendo sobre cómo superó la bulimia y sus adicciones al alcohol y a otras sustancias gracias a un embarazo inesperado, el amor incondicional de un marido y la llamada de Dios para contarlo. El arco moral de esa redención familiar la había convertido, al fin, en ciudadana respetable y sobria, ejemplar.

Actually, Doyle was not as happy as it seemed in his texts.He also locked furious in his minivan.He had discovered that his partner had been unfaithful for years.«That my husband had betrayed me did not cause me the despair that a wife with a broken heart would feel.I felt a writer's rage with the shattered plot.There is no fury that equals that of an author of testimonial works whose husband just humps the story, ”writes the affected with the honesty that characterizes her indomitable (Uranus, 2021), her second book of memories.An editorial phenomenon that in the US carries in the list of the best -selling the New York Times more than 70 weeks in a row, since it was published.His is a simple volume, with null intellectual aspirations, halfway between the 12 healing steps of addicts, feminism manual for beginners and a juic.A book in which I am encouraged to women to stop pleaseAmerican football, top scorer and Olympic medalist, who had suspended his career for drunk driving and whom he met at a writers festival.When Wambach asked him for advice to write his memoir, one could say that I gave it fallen in love in saying: «Look, I have a longer background list than your arm.Tell him everything.I do not know much about the world of sport, but I know that there, in the real world, we like real people ».

Almost a decade after that encounter, Doyle and Wambach have become the new American lesbian power coupling, showing themselves tirelessly as real people from home, in Tampa (Florida).The couple has amplified their fame thanks to sharing with their three million followers their marriage, such as the order of the dishes and cutlery when putting the dishwasher or their quarrels on how dirty a toothbrush is.Its objective is to normalize and make visible, in addition to its powerful LGTBQ+political activism, a domestic life as simple as that of others.Or how Jessica Bennett, a gender editor in The New York Times, summarized, about the "most highly identifiable" marriage from all over the United States, now everything is reduced to: "And you, are you a Glennon or an Abby?".

Friendly of Oprah, adviser of Gwyneth Paltrow and advisor to the Biden presidential campaign after seeing how the candidacy of his favorite, Elizabeth Warren, was out of the Democratic career, Doyle welcomes us in sweatshirt via zoom an afternoon of the beginning of June since herRincón de writer, that from which he has retransmitted so much.Eloquent and disproved, it warns us that he can only offer us 30 minutes because he has an appointment to record the podcast he co -presents with his sister, We Can Do Hard Things, who has invited even his ex to talk about his break and that, like everythingWhat touches, writes or produces, has also become another phenomenon in the list of Apple's most listened to in the US.During the conversation, Wambach will be heard in the background, collecting the room casting.It's like being in one of your Instagram videos.

Why do you defend "radical honesty" in your writing?

Because I don't understand why someone who considers himself an artist is not prepared to tell everything.It is curious because a lot of people describe my book as ‘self -help’ and it is precisely the opposite.This book is not about helping you, it is about stopping trying all the time, you know?It is more a book of self -reference.Also because I write to be free.Not to be ashamed of what I think, I write in the most honest way I know.When I think I can't talk about something, I know that is the next thing I have to tell in my texts.It is at the root of that denial to believe that I am different from others that moves me.I don't think shame and pride are the two sides of the same currency.Pride says: "I am better than the rest";The shame, "I am worse than the others".None of those two things are always true.Inside, we are exactly the same.When I detoxified, at meetings I learned that a way of living free is not hiding anything.And that's why I do it.It is a principle of sobriety.It is my way of life.

You write: «I chose a personality, a body, a faith and sexuality so tiny that I had to contain the breath to fit inside.No one can contain it so much time ».Why do you think women are socially domesticated?

I understood as a child.I knew I could not be hungry, I could not be ambitious and I was not allowed to have a bulky body, appetite or desire.We live under the patriarchy.Of course you don't go down the street, as a child, and you say: "Oh, of course, I am like that because I live under the patriarchal order".You don't analyze it intellectually, but you know.Our bodies know from girls.

For years you hid two bowls under your bed: one full of food to get at a wire and another vomiting void.Has it been healer to tell it?

When you have an eating disorder you think something is broken inside you.I felt like this for years, but now I know that it is not strange that all these girls go through the same.They are not broken, cultural norms on thinness simply follow.It is liberating to tell you and tell you: "Well, I'm not so strange".The most hopeful is that, if you get to that truth, to understand that women have been conditioned to be small, that is a process that can be undone.We are not born marked and screwed, it is the world that fucks us.And that means we can reverse it.

Intelligence and Knowledge.People Think i'm Smart When I Tell Them ... https: // t.CO/CEFOJXGU39

— Jen Morrigan Sun Jul 12 17:47:00 +0000 2020

In that sense, they appeal to the power of the imagination to change those structures.It is curious because today, with the rise of the claim of traditional wives (tradwives), it is becoming a certain nostalgia in returning to our parents' way of life, as if it took us to a better life.

Nostalgia only works for a very small fraction of humanity.Only a few can be applied the formula of any past time was better.It is masculine, it is for men, white and heteros.All visionaries, such as Gloria Steinem or Martin Luther King have depended on their imagination.He had that dream about a world of equality.Spoke from a space that had not been created.Nostalgia is also racism and misogyny.It does not give options to the margins, so we can only depend on our imagination.That is all we have and what we have left, because all the structures we have found were not made for us and, in fact, they were created not to give us space in any way.

You got fame by writing about your faith in God.Now you write about not knowing if God exists as you thought.You had a faithful audience that followed you, and bought your books, for aligning with those beliefs.Hasn't you afraid to lose them?

Yes, I had it.I had a lifetime creating a community.People knew me as a family woman, a man's wife, a mother, a Christian.But if I choose the comfort of others, what they expect from me above my truth, I can't advance.I may disappoint many people, but I had to be faithful to myself.Women teach us that the most important thing is to please others, but you have to fight that idea.It's great when you understand that you are not going to like everyone, when you stop trying.You're just going to live a life!In the short term it is very afraid, but in the long term, when I analyze this process, I can assure you that it has been wonderful.

You have not stopped believing in a certain energy connected to your interior, to which you call "my truth" and to which you access a process similar to meditation.How would you define your relationship with God today?

Faith is not a trial.It is not a case to defend.It is an energy.I have never felt more close to God or whatever we want to call that energy.My faith and I have reached a point where I don't care as least not forcing to explain to someone to understand it.I do not need to tell a mathematical formula for them to understand.I think about it as art.Art is not right or is wrong.It matters how it affects you and what place takes you.

You are very politicized in your activism.

Everything I say or do, everything in my life is political.Being out of politics would be to be a coward.Nor do I align with any game.My site will always be with the marginalized and the helpless, that is the people who will always have me by their side.

And how do you have the new fashion couple on Instagram?

It is very fun for Abby and for me because we are a couple of the same genre that we can live our love in a public way and show everyone that the only thing that differentiates us is that we are two women.What has surprised us most is that, media, it seems that teaching how disorderly our house has done more to normalize gay marriage than any manifestation or protest.