- This is not a drill.
This is not a drill.
Adele just recommended a book.
I mean, quite frankly, if it's good enough for Adele,
it's good enough for me.
The review in question is wild.
So Adele says, "If you're ready,
this book will shake your brain,
and make your soul a scream.
I am so ready for myself after reading this book.
It's as if I just flew into my body
for the very first time."
Literally me watching Adele perform "Someone Like You"
at the BRIT Awards, 2011.
"Anyone who has any kind of capacity to truly let go,
and give into yourself with any kind of desire
to hold on for dear life, do it, read it,
live it, practice it."
I'm getting all fired up.
Why didn't we hire Adele
to be our personal motivational speakers?
"We are a lot, but we are meant to be a lot.
A good life is a hard life.
Read this book and have a highlighter on hand to make notes
because you'll want to refer back to it, trust me.
I never knew that I'm solely responsible
for my own joy, happiness, and freedom.
Who knew that our own liberation liberates those around us?
'Cause I didn't.
I thought we were meant to be stressed and disheveled,
confused and selfless like a Disney character."
Why is Adele the most relatable person on the whole planet?
"Probloody found?
You're an absolute don Glennon."
Normalize referring to authors as an absolute don.
That my friends, that is literary criticism.
I'm out of a job.
How will I ever talk about review?
If someone reviewed my book like that, I think I'd sob.
I'd simply retire because you're never gonna top that.
Anyway, so the book is, Untamed by Glennon Doyle.
It's not the name of Draco Malfoy sidekicks?
Draco Malfoy sidekicks.
Oh, Crabbe and Goyle.
(Edwards laughs)
Sorry, Glennon Doyle.
Okay, brilliant stuff.
Anyway, I went to my local bookstore,
and I managed to find the book,
and it actually has Adele's review right here on the back.
Which to be honest, I'm not surprised by it
because if Adele reviewed my book like that,
I'll have it tattooed on my scalp.
And as if that wasn't enough,
it's also been very highly praised by Emma Watson,
Ann Hathaway, Camila Cabello, Chelsea Handler,
Nicole Richie, Carrie Washington,
and Oprah Winfrey, and Reese Witherspoon.
So the review section of this book
looks like the Met Gala lineup.
And so, I'm intrigued.
But before we, Tom Daley dive into that one,
I'm very excited to let you know that today's video
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That's right.
We are untaming my inner tech pro.
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So thank you Surfshark for sponsoring this video,
and let's get reading.
So, I just got back from a coffee shop
'cause I went in there to read
the first 100 pages of this book,
and POV, right?
Imagine you're me.
I'm reading my book,
and I turn the page just as the waiter comes over.
I order my coffee in my very broken French,
then you turn back to your book,
and you realize that you've had it open
on this page, blow jobs.
So, I'm never showing my face in that cafe ever again.
Thanks Glennon.
Thank you.
Thanks for that.
Thank you.
But aside from that mishap,
I'm kind of liking the tone of this book so far.
It's easy to read,
it's accessible.
Each chapter is about three pages,
so it's pretty fast paced.
And honestly, I find self-help books
that are broken up into smaller chunks,
a lot more palatable.
What I'm noticing is that our pal, Glennon
has a very specific way of writing
and a very specific way of utilizing language.
So, she'll pickup on a very specific idea
or term, or word, and then extrapolate that
and turn it into a metaphor.
That's giving me warm flashbacks to The Fault in Our Stars.
It's a metaphor.
For instance, the book's title "Untamed"
comes from her seeing an animal
which has been tamed in a zoo,
and feeling this discomfort out of the fact
that it's living outside of its natural habitat.
It isn't in the wild.
Which then turns into a discussion
about how humans need to let out their inner wild
and be released from their cages.
And I do think that this way of explaining your ideas
is something that helps take authors
who write non-fiction, self-help kind of books,
and have these deep sort of psychological observations.
It helps take them into the main stream.
It helps ordinary people understand
the kind of elevated lofty ideas that they have had.
Matt Hattery does this as well.
When he's talking about mental health,
he'll use a lot of metaphors of like the weather,
of different things in the natural world
which we often observe.
And it's like, okay, understand this phenomenon
in that scenario, in that context,
and now understand that's going on inside your brain too,
and that's how human beings behave as well.
And it can be incredibly effective.
And so far, I think it has been in here,
but it's a slippery slope. (Edwards laughs)
It's a very thin tight rope
where it can border on being a little bit cringe-worthy,
and also you run the risk of grotesquely, oversimplifying
very, very complex ideas
and taking something that is so massive and nuance
and trying to squeeze it into a little pigeon hole.
So the metaphor approach
is something you have to be really careful with
and it doesn't look a hundred percent of the time.
But so far so good.
So that's the first 100 pages down.
And as I'm filming this,
Adele has not yet dropped the emotional nuclear bomb,
that is her new album.
And if this book did really change Adele's mindset
to the extreme levels that she suggest it has,
then my guess is that the lyrics on 30
might be quite heavily influenced
by the core idea of this book.
I think we've already started to see this really
on "Easy On Me."
Which is essentially about the idea
of putting yourself first no matter how difficult
the decisions you have to make are to facilitate that.
She talks about wanting to feel the world around me.
I'm not going to sing it to spare your eardrums,
but that is what this book is about too.
Untamed is part memoir, part self-help.
And it's basically about Glen and Doyle's experience
of her husband cheating on her
because these hoes ain't loyal.
She decides to stay with him
for the sake of their three kids,
but then eventually realizes
that she's living a life of unhappiness.
Eventually meets a woman who she realizes
she might actually just be a bit in love with,
and she makes hard decisions,
which she knows are necessary for long-term happiness.
The other thing is that Glennon Doyle is deeply religious
and she talks about having this inner knowing inside you.
But I liked the way that she spoke about it
because it's very non preachy.
At one point her new wife sort of mocks her.
She's like, "Oh, Glen's talking to herself again."
And she says, yeah, maybe.
If what I've found in the deep is just myself,
if what I've learned is not how to communicate with God
but how to communicate with myself,
and if for the rest of my life no matter how lost I get,
I know exactly where and how to find myself again,
well then, that is certainly enough of a miracle for me.
And I thought that was great because as someone
who doesn't really consider myself religious,
I like that attitude of,
we're all just trying to make sense
of this ridiculous, crazy world by whatever means necessary.
And if that is religion for you, then great.
I like that so far, this book has kind of said,
it doesn't matter how you find the path
as long as you find it.
And I think that's a very positive message.
So, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this
and I'm also very much looking forward
to hearing 30 drop at midnight.
So I'll see tomorrow.
Divorce babes, divorce.
Hello.
It's me.
Couldn't resist.
I mean, truly, truly what did you expect?
Okay, I finished the book,
and I listened to the album,
and holy guacamole!
Grammys, hello?
Yeah, it's her again..
She did it again my friends.
She never misses.
Firstly, I would say I can see the parallels
between the album and this book.
"My Little Love", especially which broke me by the way.
It's a song about explaining divorce to your kids,
and that's a huge section of this book.
In the song, "I Drink Wine"
she talks about the sacrifices
that well, typically women have to make.
But she says, is anyone actually satisfied?
Like, is it actually worth it?
And again, that's a big theme in this book.
By the way, I'm not saying
that Adele wrote an album about this book,
but I think that it's clearly had a big impact
on her sense of self,
and also the fact that she actively promoted this book,
I think it was probably a bit of a teaser
into what we could have expected from her music.
However, the book.
I have thoughts.
I have several thoughts.
Firstly, one thing I will never stop finding irritating
is when people pretend that their kids
have really profound thoughts, just completely off the cuff.
It happens a lot on Twitter
when people will be like,
my two year old just turned to me and he's like,
"The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family
its sentimental veil
and has reduced the family relation
to a mere money relation."
And they're like, 'Isn't my kid so clever?
He just quoted monks"
Like, no, because they probably didn't actually say that.
Glennon's kids apparently will just be sitting
in the back of the car,
and articulate the most profound, philosophical observation
and thesis, worthy ideas,
and then Glennon will just have a rebuttal,
which is, you know, just as eloquent.
And honestly, it sounds like hell being in this family
'cause you go to buy a Rice Krispies
and suddenly it's a life lesson
about how everything in life, snap, crackles and pops,
Do these people ever just talk normally?
I'm like, look, I know it's for the book,
but it loses the rawness
and authenticity of real conversations when you polish them
quite as much as Glennon has in this book.
Like not every conversation we have,
everyone says the perfect completely right thing.
And so phrasing things as conversations
I think is just silly really.
It's like in Riverdale where like mid-conversation
a character will come up with
all of these feminists buzzwords.
Like step aside, penis, stalling,
upholders of the patriarchy,
it's my turn to talk now.
People don't really talk like that in my world.
Apparently they do in Riverdale
and in Glennon Doyle's world.
The other thing I thought
is that this is all about putting yourself first.
But Glennon takes this to the extreme
'cause I think there's self-love,
and then there's being a bit of a dickhead.
At one point she says,
"Recently my friend Erica called my cell phone.
I will never understand why people insist
upon calling my cell phone.
It's such an aggressive action to take calling someone.
Each time my phone rings I have a heart attack,
like my pocket's on fire,
and a tiny siren is going off."
And I just think, poor Erica.
Erica, I hope you unfollowed, unfriended,
and blocked Glennon Doyle after that.
What a hideous thing to say about someone?
And also a bit embarrassing.
I don't know.
After I read that bit, I started to lose my touch
with the author a little bit.
After that, there are really interesting sections
about raising a son as a feminist,
and how the fight for gender equality
actually benefits men as well
because they're often told that being sentimental,
or open with your feelings is feminine,
and therefore they get bottled up
and that's why we have such a huge mental health crisis.
And even though this book covers a lot of ground,
it's relatively easy to read
because Glennon is a good writer.
And I think the biggest issue this will face,
is that it will be deemed elitist or privileged.
You know, I'm sure people will say,
"How fortunate you are
that the only problem in your life is your divorce."
But everything is relative, right?
I worry that book criticism and criticism in general
is moving to a point
where you can literally just dismiss absolutely anything
by being like, "That's privileged.
You have privilege."
And yes, context is so important.
Recognizing privilege is incredibly important,
but I feel like it's become such a buzzword
that people now say, "That's privilege"
and then just mic drop
and that's it.
We have to dismiss this thing.
But just because someone has more privilege
than someone else,
that doesn't mean that what they've created is worthless
just because other people have bigger,
objectively more important issues.
A lot of people will find
huge amounts of comfort in this book,
and that's important and it makes it worth writing.
Sometimes you need to read a book
written by someone like you.
I'm here all week guys.
So, I guess this is a bit of a mixed review for me
because I liked aspects of this book,
but also I found the attitude
of being entirely self-serving a little bit much.
I don't know.
I think with self-help books,
you always have to sort of take them with a pinch of salt.
And usually, if you apply every single theory
that a self-help book gives you,
it might turn you into a bit of a dickhead.
So just be careful.
Approach with caution.
I'm now gonna go and find a small hole to sit in
and listen to, "To Be Loved" by Adele on loop.
I mean, there's only two weeks
until Spotify Wrapped comes out.
And Adele said, challenge accepted.
I will be number one on your list.
So huge shout out to Surfshark for sponsoring this video.
I really, really appreciate your support.
If you liked this video, you can give it a like,
if you like, and you can subscribe for more from me
if you're feeling generous.
All the best, stay in touch,
don't forget me I beg,
and I wish nothing but the best for you too.
Anyway, bye.
See you next time