Summary and Analysis of Love Warrior: A Memoir: Based on the Book by Glennon Doyle Melton
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Summary and Analysis of Love Warrior: A Memoir: Based on the Book by Glennon Doyle Melton
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This short summary and analysis of Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Character analysis
- Important quotes
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- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton:
Written with unflinching honesty and hard-earned wisdom, Glennon Doyle Melton’s memoir, Love Warrior, is the story of one woman’s journey from devastating heartbreak after her husband’s infidelity to a new understanding of what it means to love, to marry, and to be a woman.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504044141 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 726 KB |
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Summary and Analysis of Love Warrior
Based on the Book by Glennon Doyle Melton
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4414-1
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Prelude
It's Glennon Doyle's wedding day. As she exchanges vows with her new husband, Craig, Glennon reflects that her marriage will make her a new person — and a better person, she hopes. She's sober now. She's a wife. And soon, she'll be a mother.
Part One
Although Love Warrior is the story of Glennon's marriage, she muses that her marriage didn't really begin the day she walked down the aisle — its roots extend deep into her childhood.
1.
Glennon's family — her mother, father, and sister — have always loved and supported her. Regardless, Glennon struggles with bulimia, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem starting at the age of ten. Glennon learns to act the way she believes others want her to act. She calls the person she presents to the outside world her "representative." Glennon's representative does what all the other girls do: She loses her virginity, attends parties, and drinks. By living life as her "representative," Glennon hides her inner pain.
During her senior year of high school, Glennon checks in to a mental institution. She finds some relief there, where nobody has to hide his or her pain. She returns to high school, graduates, and enters college. There, she joins a sorority, parties regularly, and dates a fraternity brother. But she continues to suffer from bulimia and anxiety, and she starts drinking heavily.
2.
Glennon graduates from college, moves back to her hometown, rents a townhouse with two friends, and finds a job teaching third grade. Every night, she gets blackout drunk. She starts to date Craig, a handsome man who attended her high school two years ahead of her.
After only a short time with Craig, Glennon finds out she's pregnant and has an abortion. That night, after taking Glennon to the clinic, Craig leaves her home alone so he can attend a party with his friends; Glennon gets drunk alone. Though she continues seeing Craig afterward, her alcoholism spirals seriously out of control. Finally, Glennon's parents intervene and give her an ultimatum: Stop drinking, or they're out of her life. They advise her to meet with a priest.
3.
Glennon goes to see the priest her parents have connected her with. At the church, she feels a sense of peace standing beneath a painting of the Virgin Mary.
When the priest enters, he ruptures Glennon's feeling of calm. He admonishes her and tells her she has to repent for her sins. As soon as she leaves his office, Glennon returns to the painting of Mary. Mary, she feels, accepts her, and wants her to be good. Glennon lights a candle for herself and drives home, allowing herself to feel sadness — a sadness Mary accepts and loves. At the church, Glennon finds two different kinds of God: the God of love, represented by the Virgin Mary's unconditional acceptance, and the administrative version of God, typified by the priest's disapproval.
4.
Glennon tries to stay sober, but soon lapses back into her routine of drinking and passing out every night. She fears that sobriety would mean the loss of her personality, humor, and wit. Then she finds out that she is pregnant again.
Glennon sees her pregnancy as an invitation from God to turn her life around. She decides to keep the baby, which means she has to get sober. With the help of her sister and parents, she attends a recovery group. Craig, who initially feels fear and uncertainty about the baby, proposes to her. She accepts.
5.
We return to book's opening scene: Glennon's wedding day. Glennon wears a tiara, high heels, and a white dress. She and Craig are nervous — their hands shake, and when they think of their future, they feel hope and fear blurred together.
Glennon expects the sex she has on her wedding night to be different, special, but for her, the sex is the same as it's always been. She dissociates from the experience. She feels lonely — did marriage transform her into a new person, as she had thought it would? Glennon's marriage to Craig is not the clear-cut "becoming" she thought it would be; instead, it's confusing and uncertain. Still, she resolves to embrace her new life with hope and determined commitment.
Part Two
After three children and a successful new career as a writer, Glennon's marriage has settled into comfortable routine — until Craig's shocking, devastating infidelity destroys her trust in him along with her own sense of identity.
6. Glennon and Craig embrace domesticity. Both are unsure about their new roles, but they devote themselves to doing well by their baby. One doctor tells them it is likely that their baby boy has Down syndrome. However, Chase is born without any physical or mental abnormalities. Glennon and Craig go on to have two daughters, Amanda and Patricia.
Glennon continues to feel lonely in her marriage. Though she finds fulfillment in motherhood, her relationship with Craig is not sexually or emotionally satisfying. She and Craig have trouble communicating: While Glennon expresses herself through conversation, Craig expresses himself through sex. One night, Craig invites Glennon to watch porn with him, and she accepts. Afterward, disturbed by the experience, Glennon asks Craig to get rid of his porn, and he agrees.
7.
While continuing to care for her three children, Glennon begins to write. She starts out with a brutally honest Facebook post, and soon, her writing grows into a daily habit. In writing, Glennon is able to confess her darkest secrets and grapple with her demons. Eventually, she starts a blog, which goes viral and leads to a book contract. Along with her regular readers, even Craig follows the blog, and often, he finds out about her internal state online rather than by talking to her in person.
Meanwhile, Glennon becomes extremely ill with Lyme disease. She and Craig decide to move to Naples, Florida. Glennon hopes for a fresh start, not realizing then that wherever the family goes, their problems will follow.
8.
One day, after the laptop she uses gets a virus, Glennon logs on to the family computer and opens a strange file. Shocked, she jumps back in her seat. She has stumbled upon Craig's hoard of pornographic images. When Glennon confronts him, he apologizes and agrees to start therapy. Their relationship grows chilly, but they remain on cordial terms.
After a few months, Glennon attends one of Craig's therapy sessions. Though she is expecting that they will discuss the pornography, Craig instead confesses that he has been sleeping with other women. He describes this as a series of one-night stands and says it's been going on since a few months after their wedding. Devastated, Glennon tells him that their marriage is over, he is no longer welcome in her home, and he should pick his things up while the kids are not home. She drives away, calls her sister, picks up her kids, puts them to bed, and collapses alone in her house. Who is she now that her identity as a wife has shattered? After some soul-searching and writing, Glennon decides to simply focus on facing each new moment as it arrives.
9.
Glennon, still reeling, vacillates between the desire to divorce Craig and the desire to mend their relationship. Her friends respond in various ways. Some are "Shovers," who try to push away Glennon's problems with easy aphorisms. Others are "Comparers," who minimize Glennon's pain by likening it to the pain of others. Then there are "Fixers," who offer Glennon easy formulas to solve her problems; "Reporters," who thrive on the gossip; and "Victims," who blame Glennon for not including them more in her woes.
At Glennon's church, a group of women urge her to save her marriage in order to stay close to God. Glennon disagrees — she believes that God wants her to do what's best for her family. She leaves the church, resolving to stop looking to others for advice. She will follow her own intuition instead.
10.
While Glennon stumbles through her new life as a single mother, Craig starts working on their marriage in every way he can. He cooks meals, cleans her car, donates to a women's shelter, and begins seeing a new therapist. Glennon allows him to move back in, but she feels she can't trust him.
To gain perspective, she takes a trip to the beach and listens hard to the "still, small voice" inside her. She decides that she'll wait one year before making any more decisions about her marriage. In the meantime, she'll begin therapy and "come to sunset three times a week."
Part Three
In the wake of Craig's unfaithfulness, her family broken apart, Glennon begins to piece her life back together. She goes to therapy, starts yoga, and tentatively finds a way to trust and love Craig once again.
11.
Glennon, who has lost weight and cut her waist-length hair into a pixie cut, goes to her first therapy session. She's nervous, but she immediately connects with her therapist, Ann. Glennon and Ann agree that Glennon needs to work to understand her past and reconnect with her body in a positive way.
Glennon reflects on her relationship with her body. She realizes she has hidden from her emotions in various ways since she was a child: She escaped into books, then into bulimia, then into boys and booze, then into writing. She decides that she will take a hiatus from writing and focus instead on engaging with her life. By working on her relationship with herself, Glennon hopes to find greater clarity in her relationship with Craig.
12.
Glennon starts attending yoga class, where she learns to respect her body. But three months into her yoga and therapy regimen, she and Craig still sleep in separate rooms. This distresses her children. One frustrating day, Glennon attends a hot yoga class and simply sits with her emotional pain, enduring it rather than fighting or numbing it. Her teacher tells her that this is the Journey of the Warrior.
Glennon reflects that, all her life, she's been running from loneliness. She numbed her sadness with food, alcohol, and other distractions. Glennon realizes that Craig turned to porn as a way of avoiding his own pain, just as she turned to bulimia. When Glennon returns home, she lets Craig cook her a real meal, and she allows herself to eat the whole thing. Later, Craig sits down with her and asks if they can talk; he is working on communication and wants to practice listening to her.
13.
Glennon attends a meditative breathing class. In the class, she learns to breathe from her belly and to direct her being toward God — and here, says the instructor, God goes by any name you wish to give him or her. Glennon experiences a renewed connection to God. Feeling loved just as she is, Glennon thinks of Craig. He asked her to love him as he was, she realizes, and she understands that she and Craig aren't so different. True love and forgiveness are unconditional.
At home, she speaks to Craig about her revelation. She hasn't forgiven him yet, but she believes God has forgiven him. Glennon researches the meaning of the word woman, which her old church taught her was "helper." She finds another definition of the original Hebrew word for woman: warrior. Glennon's process of healing and self-discovery has not been a becoming, but rather an unbecoming; she has stripped herself down to her most essential, naked self. She is a Love Warrior.
14.
At a speaking event in Michigan, Glennon meets a woman from Naples who recommends a church in Glennon's neighborhood. Wary, Glennon and her family attend a Sunday service. They find a loving, accepting, and open-minded community of worshippers.
Glennon begins to feel ready for physical affection with Craig, though she still distrusts him and doesn't yet want to have sex with him. She practices communicating with him about physical affection; she tells him not to hug her too tightly and to respect her space. One night, they share a loving kiss.
15.
On her thirty-eighth birthday, Glennon watches her daughter's soccer game. She also watches the coach — her husband, Coach Craig. She sees him as handsome, patient, and kind. Glennon feels ready to take the next step and have sex. When they're back at home in bed, she and Craig are both nervous, but for a moment they succeed at truly sharing themselves.
Glennon wonders: What is sexiness? One day, her daughter asks her about it. Sexiness, she says, is something earned by being yourself and by working to be the best version of who you are. Glennon urges her daughters to be beautiful. Beautiful is not the way you look, she explains, but who you are and how you live your life. Beautiful women glow from the inside out. Glennon realizes that she has found a unity of body, mind, and soul. She now knows that she never has to act according to other people's rules. She has learned who she is and how to honor herself.
Afterword
Glennon and Craig stand on the beach, dressed casually. In a mirroring of the book's first scene, they exchange their vows, but this time, they know themselves and each other far better. For now, at least, Glennon and Craig have chosen the path that leads to each other. Though their future is not absolutely certain, Glennon knows that she is ready for whatever comes next: She is a Love Warrior.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Love Warrior by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Glennon Doyle Melton,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
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