Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach Want You to Know We Can Still Do Hard Things
The couple on their podcast’s one-year anniversary, telling the truth, and taking Untamed’s queer love story to the small screen.
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Sitting down with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach feels like taking a deep breath. Whether they’re discussing the intentional, politically driven design of separating queer existence from faith or reflecting on the “radical” act of transparency that comes along with discussing mental health, these two—both as a couple and as individuals—are devoted to candid, collective, and just storytelling. Wednesday marks one year since that devotion fueled the launch of their podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. In it, Doyle, Wambach, and Doyle’s sister Amanda (known as “Sister”) bring on guests like ALOK, Chanel Miller, Megan Rapinoe, Gabrielle Union, and Tarana Burke to tackle stories of identity, activism, sex, navigating trauma, and everything in between.
Vanity Fair chatted with the duo about the show’s evolution, vulnerability, and systemic oppression. They also give a glimpse at one of their upcoming projects: the TV adaptation of Doyle’s novel Untamed.
Vanity Fair: It’s been a year since you launched your podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. How do you feel?
Glennon Doyle: I feel really grateful. I can’t believe I get to do this with my sister and my wife, my two favorite people on Earth; from my couch, my favorite place on Earth; doing my favorite thing, exploring ideas and being a bridge between interesting human beings and my community. It’s a lot of freaking work and I take it really seriously, because it’s a big honor and privilege to tell these people’s stories. I’ve never done that before. I have only messed with myself, so it feels heavy sometimes.
Abby Wambach: You know, I was so nervous about retiring from soccer. There was so much purpose inside what I was doing. It wasn’t just about me, it was about that little girl or boy in the stands. We were activists who didn’t necessarily know it all the time. We were playing sports, but really what we were doing was revolutionary in many ways. I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to replicate that feeling of purpose for the rest of my working life—obviously having a family and being a wife has its own sense of purpose. This year has made me understand that what I did on the soccer field gave me a platform to be able to do this work.
Doyle: Also, writing a book is very lonely for me. It’s disappearing from my life. And I finally love my life. Writing another book did not feel like what I wanted to do, and social media sure didn’t [either]. This was two years ago. It was a serious time in our country. We needed nuanced, in-depth conversations. We needed another medium where we could have more gray fixations and more immediate conversations.
And how do you decide which stories to tell?
Doyle: In the very beginning, we asked our community—we call them the pod squad—who do you want to hear from? I think we had 13,000 people on a spreadsheet from 17,000 comments. We had a treasure trove of people—from people with 10 million followers to brilliant minds with six. If you want to know how we do it, there’s a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth. I sit with [each interviewee]. I have days where I’m like, Okay, today’s the day I get to think about Chanel Miller—reading everything she’s ever said, going for a walk and only thinking about her. I feel like I’m spending a week with each person.
Wambach: I’ll walk into the room and she’ll be reading someone’s book and I’m like, “What are you doing?” And she’ll go, “Oh, I’m just hanging out with so-and-so.”
The podcast strikes a balance of being incredibly vulnerable, candid, and intimate on a very public platform. How do you exist within that fine line?
Doyle: It would feel difficult if that’s not how [our platform] was built. But I started writing right when I got sober after being lost to food and alcohol addiction for a very long time. I found the magic of recovery: We don’t have to be ashamed of anything. We can talk about all of our hard things. We live in service of others. That was how I built relationships and a career.
Wambach: It’s one of the things that was such a draw, for me, to you. I came from a world of women’s soccer. I had a bit of fame, but I didn’t really tell the world who I was, which was the downfall in my addiction to alcohol. When I met [Glennon], I learned that I actually just needed to be honest about sobriety. That’s it; that’s all I needed to be. And on the podcast, it’s still a little nerve-racking when you’re about to divulge personal information publicly.
One time, I was going to talk about my experience of walking into public restrooms and getting mistaken for a man—which happens about 95% of the time. I felt like sharing it would have been embarrassing, because it’s embarrassing in the moment. But the response that I got from people who present like me, that have had this exact experience, has made my experience walking into public restrooms completely different.
You know, I lost my father to suicide. And he was also unfaithful in my parents’ marriage. And I am vocal about it, but other people sort of trip over their words when I bring it up. But tiptoeing over your own experiences, that is more terrifying.
Wambach: And you’re bringing something that has felt like it’s been in the shadows into the light by talking about it with no shame.
In that vein, let’s talk about the circulation of Untamed. How does it feel to hear that your story has become a way for folks to share their own stories?
Doyle: I think that it would be scary as hell if I didn’t truly know that none of that is actually about me, but is the power that happens when anybody tells the truth about their life. When I started recovery, I was proposed this theory that if you just tell the truth, you will find more connection with other human beings, you will feel freer—because you won’t be carrying shame. And then I got to test the theory in such a magnified way.
What I really believe about freedom—which is why it’s being so heavily opposed right now on so many levels—is that it’s wildly contagious. When people hand Untamed to each other, it feels to me like what they’re saying is, “I’m trying to give you a little bit of freedom.”
And I know that doesn’t have to do with me personally because there are many people passing it to each other who aren’t queer. And [Untamed] is a queer love story—not just romantically, either. It’s about queer faith. It’s about queer gender. I think people are just trying to pass the baton.
Since it’s the season of Mother’s Day, I want to talk about what motherhood means for you both.
Doyle: I don’t even think of the word mother as a noun anymore. It’s a verb. Liz Gilbert, Tracee Ellis Ross, Oprah—these are people who have decided not to have biological children but mother us and the world better than anybody. The activists in our lives are probably the fiercest mothers that we know. Which is how Mother’s Day started—as a day to activate communities. There is a way of thinking about mothering that, in some ways, is at the root of a lot of our country’s challenges. Which is what I wrote about in Untamed. There’s this idea that my job as a mother is to protect my particular child—give them six iPads, seven flavors of cream cheese. But what if we make our mothering lens a lot wider and consider that all children are our children? What would that look like?
Wambach: We both come at motherhood from a different perspective, [Glennon’s] being the biological route and mine as a bonus parent. Early on in our relationship and marriage, I was considering having a biological child of my own. As time went on, I realized that these three children were enough for me. I didn’t need to do it myself in order to feel like a mother. I’ve been able to understand bonus motherhood in many ways as the most selfless, loving experience of my life. I’m married into these children’s lives. I don’t have any legal binding to them, no blood relation. So in some ways, they have to choose if they opt into this love. I ask Glennon all the time, “Do you feel jealous that our kids choose to love me and they have to love you?” [Laughs.]
And now that’s another layer to motherhood in the context of choice, which is so pertinent—especially this week.
Doyle: And it also suggests this idea: is motherhood without choice even motherhood?
You mentioned how Untamed is a queer love story in many ways—including queer faith. Those two things have historically been in conflict with one another.
Doyle: Well, and that’s on purpose. We know that pre–Roe v. Wade, abortion and gay rights were nonissues for evangelicals. Then desegregation happened, and evangelicals lost their right to have tax-exempt private schools. They were very fired up about that. But they knew they couldn’t publicly go against civil rights as an issue. So they deliberately chose to be antiabortion and gay rights because those are easier for rallying a voting bloc. This movement against progress—or really against what is—and the blood that is pumping through the veins of antiabortion, gay-marriage rhetoric, is racism. The fact that any Christian would be toeing this line without doing the research necessary to figure out where this came from is unconscionable.
We did this beautiful interview with Ocean Vuong recently, and he was talking about wanting to keep claiming masculinity, even in the face of what masculinity has come to mean to people in this country. He said, “I don’t want to leave it. I want to stay and complicate.” And I think that’s always how I’ve felt about faith. In our family, the Christian mandate “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” means that every good thing you want for yourself, you must fight for others to have in our country. The ones who have been othered are brown people, Black people, women people, unhoused people, neurodivergent people, poor people. Health care, bodily autonomy—right now any Christian man who wants to have bodily autonomy and is not out there for women…[sighs]. I have had many moments where I’ve been like, I cannot take that association anymore—more guns, less gays. But then I also think, no, I don’t want it to be hijacked for me.
Before we wrap, let’s talk about the upcoming TV adaptation of Untamed. How does it feel to move into a new medium of storytelling—one that includes Sarah Paulson playing you, Glennon?
Doyle: I think I can say right now, I feel really hopeful about what the show could be because of the people that we have involved in telling it.
Wambach: And because Hollywood’s the Wild Wild West.
Doyle: Right, not saying it hasn’t been weird. But you know, some magical things have happened. Like only [auditioning] one actor [for me]. It was scary for us because I was like, “Okay, so the thing is, it has to be Sarah.” It had to be somebody who is a transformational actor, who is in touch with the world and involved in everything we care about, and who is queer. So you make me that list!
The center of that Venn diagram is Sarah.
Doyle: Exactly. I waited for so long to ask her because I was scared she was gonna say no. It’s like when you don’t look for something you lost because you’re afraid you actually won’t find it. I wrote her a letter and told her why I wanted it to be her. And she wrote me back in minutes saying that she could not believe this was happening because when she read Untamed the year prior, she knew she was supposed to play me. The person I’m cowriting with is Sarah McCarron. She’s a young, queer, radical, brilliant woman bringing these new fresh ideas. Jessie Nelson is a producer on it, and she is so in touch with the mental health and mother-daughter aspects.
And then there’s this crazy thing that happened creatively. I’m cowriting it with Sarah, and there was this moment where I was writing and proposing dialogue. I wrote the words and Sarah—who has an extremely powerful background in theater—said to me, “Yeah, but the words are like the least true thing that we have.” And I was like, “I’m sorry?! I’ve been working for 15 years with words.” And it blew my mind because Untamed is so much about our bodies—our bodies know, our bodies tell the truth; all of the homophobia, the racism, the conditioning is in our minds. And so to be exploring that—I don’t think there are many queer love stories that are told by queer people for queer people that are real like this.