Untamed

Part 2 begins with an epigraph featuring the poem “Dropping Keys” by the fourteenth century Persian lyric poet Hafiz. The poem describes how a small woman builds cages for those around her while a wise woman drops keys “for the / Beautiful / Rowdy / Prisoners” (43).

Doyle recounts getting sober at the age of twenty-six after becoming pregnant with her son. She celebrates the significance of this time when she writes, “Sobriety was the field in which I began to remember my wild” (45). She recalls how she “began building the kind of life a woman is supposed to build” as “a good wife, mother, daughter, Christian, citizen, writer, woman” (45). Despite these positive changes, Doyle remembers feeling a restlessness that “felt powerful enough to destroy every bit of the lovely life I’d built” (45). Doyle retreats inside herself and conceals these strong feelings until the she can no longer hide them. This moment of change comes when she meets Abby.

Upon meeting Abby, Doyle is able to see herself more clearly and feels reconnected to her untamed child self who “was wild until I was tamed by shame” (46). She lists the ways in which she has been shamed into shrinking herself to fit the restrictive labels thrust upon young women.