This article originally appears in the June 2017 issue of ELLE.
Let's pretend for a minute that it's early 2016 and you are Glennon Doyle Melton—wife, mother, spiritual exemplar, sun-bronzed poster girl for a kind of messy, beautiful domestic imperfection that, somehow, makes you even more perfect. You're the world's most famous Christian mommy blogger, a heroine and role model to your one million social media followers. Your first memoir, Carry On, Warrior, was a best-seller. Now you're about to release your second—Love Warrior, a gripping chronicle of how you saved your marriage following your husband Craig's infidelity. The book ends with you and Craig standing on the beach facing the Gulf of Mexico, renewing your vows and affirming the gritty path of the Warrior: "Love, Pain, Life: I am not afraid. I was born to do this."
And then, right before the book is published, you attend a literary conference and spot a woman across the room. She has spiky, platinum-tipped hair, an impish smile, and calf muscles the size of tree trunks. She is U.S. soccer superstar Abby Wambach. And you know instantly that she is the love of your life. What do you do?
"You enter the process of deciding whether you're going to risk every single thing in your life to have the one thing you've always wanted," Melton tells me, sitting on a buff-colored sofa in her beachy Naples, Florida, bungalow. Outside, a sparkling pool ripples quietly, and the banyan trees rustle in the breeze. Beams of light filter in through the bay windows, dappling the milky wooden floor. Melton—gorgeous, barefoot, and waiflike in her rolled-up size zero jeans—hugs her knees and tucks a loose strand of blond hair behind her ear. "I've never believed in or understood romantic love," she says. "Love at first sight was always a complete joke to me. But when Abby walked into that room, I actually felt the words There she is. This was just an absolute recognizing of the person I was supposed to be with forever."
I clearly remember the first time I encountered Melton's writing. My son was in kindergarten and my daughter in preschool. My husband had just accepted a new job that required him to travel constantly. I was going through a phase where I felt constantly irritable and hard-pressed to find any joy in life. Unlike Adrienne Rich, I did not channel my discontent into a series of brilliant and searing sociopolitical essays. Instead, I did a lot of yelling and carrying on. I remember yelling at my son for refusing to write in his school-required Random Acts of Kindness journal, yelling at my toddler daughter for refusing to wear the $45 Skedaddle dress I'd bought her at J.Crew, yelling at my husband for not being around to help out.
Around this time, a friend e-mailed me an essay Melton had posted on her Momastery blog. I almost filed it in the trash. I was not a reader of mommy blogs. I'd come across a few—Dooce, Rage Against the Minivan—and found them full of yawnable platitudes. But then here was this, from Melton:
Every evening Craig walks through the door, smiles hopefully and says, 'How was your day?' This question is like a spotlight pointed directly at the chasm between his experience of a 'day' and my experience of a 'day.' How was my day?...I look down at my spaghetti-stained pajama top, unwashed hair and gorgeous baby on my hip and I want to say:
How was my day? It was a lifetime. It was the best of times and the worst of times. I was both lonely and never alone. I was simultaneously bored out of my skull and completely overwhelmed. I was saturated with touch—desperate to get the baby off me and the second I put her down I yearned to smell her sweet skin again. This day required more than I'm physically and emotionally capable of, while requiring nothing from my brain. I had thoughts today, ideas, real things to say and no one to hear them.
This was powerful stuff, a cri de coeur against the existential cost of total motherhood and its capacity to erode the self. Melton had found a way to capture emotions I'd tried and failed to put into words. Her essay felt like a balm for someone who was struggling to hold fast to her own thoughts and ideas, who'd canceled her subscription to the London Review of Books but was drowning in Stone Soup.
I bought Melton's memoir and began following her on Facebook and Instagram. As a Jewish mother living in L.A., I was outside her target demographic and nonplussed by her Christian life tips: I had no desire to meet my husband at the kitchen table at sunrise to talk about Jesus. But I liked the meditative quality of Melton's writing on parenting, and I found her suburban battle hymns fortifying, if a little hokey. "We can do hard things," I'd repeat to myself, feeling like Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt as I cleaned up fruit-snack puke. "We are not afraid.… We were born to do this."
And, like millions of others, I got hooked on Melton's drip-feed of juicy confessions about her own imperfectly perfect family: her "kind, giving, gorgeous" husband, Craig; her three irrepressible children; and her fluffy Lhasa Apso, Theo.
Melton always seemed authentic and relatable—a perky, feisty everymom who preheated her oven with a hair dryer and spent evenings on the sofa, "gazing from pile of floor crap to pile of floor crap." But in retrospect, there was something hollow at the core of this suburban family mise-en-scène. Melton, the avatar of marital recovery and the magic that is possible "when a man and a woman truly know one another," did not truly know herself. She had not realized she was gay. (For the record, she describes herself as "gay for the purposes of activism," but insists that her true orientation defies classification: "My sexuality is Abby," she tells me.)
And indeed, Love Warrior is littered with signs that all was not as it seemed: Melton admits that she "doesn't like sex"; that she finds the act "odd and icky" and that even kissing Craig is a nightmare ("Kissing…Who decided this was a thing?"). In the final pages of the memoir, as Glennon and Craig gamely clasp hands and walk off together into the sunset, you almost want to throw the book across the room: Life's too short, Glennon!
Glennon Doyle Melton was born 41 years ago in the affluent Fairfax County enclave of Burke, Virginia. Her name, Glennon, means "valley," or "resting place between the hills." But from the moment she arrived, there was no rest for her parents, two moderately observant Catholics named Richard and Patricia. Richard, who was known as Bubba, was a middle school principal and high school football coach; Patricia was a sweet-natured high school guidance counselor whose beauty inspired what Glennon calls "quiet reverence." The couple tried to create a storybook childhood for Glennon and her younger sister, Amanda, with family vacations on their 29-foot sailboat and Friday nights in the popcorn-littered stands of the local high school stadium, cheering on Bubba's team.
Still, life with Glennon proved relentlessly harrowing. She became bulimic at 10, had her first alcoholic blackout at 13, and checked into a mental hospital at 17. "I had a relatively magical childhood, which added an extra layer of guilt to my pain and confusion," she wrote in Carry On, Warrior. "Glennon—why are you all jacked up when you have no excuse to be jacked up?"
From a young age, she was a study in paradox and a living embodiment of what continues to be her favorite principle, "And/Both," which holds that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. Throughout junior high and high school, even as she binged and purged until her throat burned and was carried out of parties after too many shots from the ice luge, she was a lacrosse star, viola player, homecoming court nominee, and student government officer. Her Senior Superlative, she notes in her memoir, was "Leading Leader."
By the time she entered college, she'd become a full-blown alcoholic, reaching for a beer the moment she stepped out of bed and taking it into the shower with her. She maxed out her credit cards, became a chain smoker, and snorted coke topped off with crushed ADD drugs. Through the fog, she graduated with an English degree from James Madison University in 1999 and found work as a grade-school teacher, but although her love for her students sustained her, it did not slow her pace of self-destruction.
On July 4, 2001, when she was 24, Glennon met Craig Melton, a brawny part-time model and semipro soccer player, at an all-day bar crawl in Washington, DC. Glennon and Craig slept together the first night they met and began "drinking and drugging constantly," as Melton writes in Carry On, Warrior. Melton quickly found herself pregnant and in an abortion clinic. Craig offered to pay but Glennon waved him off: "I've got it."
Several months later, on Mother's Day 2002, Melton discovered she was pregnant again. No abortion this time. "I become aware, there on the floor, that I will have this baby," she writes in Love Warrior.
With typical dramatic flair, she quit everything that afternoon—cold turkey. She donned a rhinestone tiara and high heels and married Craig—"a man I'd known for 10 sober nights"—in a ceremony in his childhood backyard in Burke. She had the baby, a boy they named Chase. The three settled in Fairfax, about five miles north of their hometown. She went on Lexapro and became a preschool teacher. The family grew: Tish, named after Glennon's mother, was born in 2006; Amma, named after her sister, Amanda, followed in 2008.
Less than a year after Amma was born, Melton logged on to Facebook, noticed her friends were writing "25 Things About Me" lists, and figured she'd contribute her own. Number five: "I am a recovering alcoholic and bulimic, seven years sober. Sometimes I miss excessive booze and food, in the same indescribable way you can miss someone who abused you and repeatedly left you for dead." After she posted it, she realized her friends had written things like "My favorite game is bunco" and "My favorite snack food is hummus."
Embarrassed, Melton tried to delete her list. But her inbox was already overflowing with e-mails from friends and acquaintances, thanking her for putting it all out there. Emboldened, she decided to devote herself to writing. Her sister bought her a laptop; Craig converted a walk-in closet into a tiny office and preprogrammed the family coffeemaker for 4:30 a.m. On July 27, 2009, Melton launched Momastery, where she would "tell people the truth about my insides" and hopefully shine a path toward "an alternate, kinder, truer, braver way to live in the world."
Two and a half years later, Melton posted an essay called "Don't Carpe Diem." It was a rejoinder to all the little old ladies who saw her at the grocery store with her kids, threw their hands over their heart, and implored her to "enjoy every moment." "I can't even carpe 15 minutes in a row," she wrote. "So a whole diem is out of the question." In 1,600 sinewy words, Melton worked in references to Dorothy Parker and God, riffed on the concept of standard time versus metaphysical or kairos time, and nailed the dismount with her own suggested script for what one might say to the mom gritting her teeth at Target: "'It's helluva hard, isn't it? You're a good mom. I can tell. And I like your kids, especially that one peeing in the corner. She's my favorite. Carry on, warrior. Six hours till bedtime.' "
"Don't Carpe Diem" broke the Internet. It was shared 4,370,000 times and caught the attention of top book publishers. "I started reading it as the pages were coming out of the printer," says Whitney Frick, an editor at Scribner at the time. "I thought, Yes. This. This is what I've been wanting as an editor. I wanted to publish the next Anne Lamott, the next Liz Gilbert—as did the rest of New York City. It was a 10-publisher auction that went on for 10 days."
Scribner won the bidding war for the book that became Carry On, Warrior, a collection of essays mostly drawn from Momastery posts. The book debuted at number three on the New York Times best-seller list in the spring of 2013 and has 330,000 copies in print. Melton was becoming a juggernaut. At the time she published "Don't Carpe Diem," she had 1,415 Facebook followers. Five years later, she had 660,000. In addition to her social media glory, Glennon—who relocated her family from Virginia to Florida in 2012—was also metamorphosing into a superstar IRL. With her SoulCycle physique and glamorous, husky-voiced stage presence, she quickly established herself on the lecture circuit alongside Elizabeth Gilbert, Brené Brown, Cheryl Strayed, and Rob Bell (the pastor who wrote the best-selling Love Wins) in a roving wolf pack of acclaimed authors turned motivational speakers and "aspirational spirituality" practitioners—Entourage as directed by Marianne Williamson. After drinking from the same sweating water pitcher at a half-dozen healing retreats and wellness summits, Melton and Eat Pray Love author Gilbert became close friends.
"When I first met her, she had this reticence and insecurity and fear about what was happening in her life," Gilbert recalls. "There were a bunch of us—Brené, Rob, Cheryl—who are older than she is. All of us are established; all of us have written books." And from Melton, Gilbert continues, "There was a lot of 'You're my hero, you're my hero.' Now, you know what? Every one of us sees her as our leader. For someone who was once meek to be followed by the people she admired—that's an amazing power of leadership."
Melton's star wattage has, at times, unhinged her followers. After several incidents in which the gamine warrior was almost knocked off her heels by stampeding fans, ticket holders for her events now queue up—and at times pay extra—if they want an embrace. "Sponsor Ticket Holders Hug Line: 5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m." reads a flyer for a recent Melton speech in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Glennon says her current hug capacity is 1,200 per hour.) Her disciples have been photographed crawling into Melton's lap onstage in the middle of her speeches. Others write worshipful comments on her Facebook page. "You know who you look like? BVM," gushed one follower, underneath a photo showing Melton cradling an emotional fan in her arms. BVM, as in the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Yet as she prepared to publish her second book—a no-holds-barred account of her marital struggles that culminates with a reconciled Glennon and Craig in bed doing "the dance of surrender" and "finally, after 13 years of marriage, fall[ing] in love"—there was a snag: Glennon announced that she and her leading man were separating. That would have seemed to undercut the premise of the new book, but shortly thereafter, Melton scored the holy grail—the blessing of Oprah Winfrey. In a segment that aired on September 11 on OWN's SuperSoul Sunday, Melton and the Queen of All Media are shown sitting on wicker chairs drinking iced tea and strolling across Oprah's spacious Montecito backyard, swinging hands like schoolgirls as they "share the truth of their lives." As Melton put it in her blog, she had a "new friendship." "My new friend's name is Oprah," she wrote. "We have started corresponding a bit. I address my e-mails to her, 'Dear God's Girl' and I sign them: 'Love, God's Girl.' "
Love Warrior was an instant smash, debuting at number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Unbeknown to her fans, though, Melton had even more truth to share: She'd fallen in love with Abby and wanted to go public. Her kitchen cabinet told her that this time, she'd better keep her lip zipped.
"Think about it," Gilbert says. "If you're 'Glennon Doyle Melton' in quotation marks, this is brand suicide. It's just such an extreme pivot. Everyone else who cared about her said, 'Don't do this thing. You're going to sabotage your life. Everything you've worked so hard for is going to be destroyed.' "
"It felt tricky," admits Frick, Melton's book editor. "If she did and said the honest thing, you'd risk people feeling that the book is devalued."
Even God's Girl coughed up a hairball. When Melton confided in her new friend on the eve of her official coming-out, "Oprah said, 'Get ready. The bloodbath will be tomorrow,'" Melton recalls.
The next day, she posted a selfie on her Facebook page of her and Abby grinning: "Feels like the world could use all the love it can get right now. So today, I'm going to share with you my new love. Her name is Abby. You might recognize her from soccer."
Melton's fans took the news in stride; the bloodbath never came. "You deserve it, you Love Warrior, you!" wrote a reader from South Dakota. Another wrote: "I just don't have a 'Love' emoji big enough for this." In the two days following Melton's coming-out post, her hug line only grew. She lost 4,521 followers. She gained 6,670. As of this writing, Love Warrior has more than 500,000 copies in circulation and been translated into 18 languages.
As for Craig, he remembers receiving an urgent text message from Glennon one afternoon, saying she had something very serious to discuss. "It sounded like 911, like Code Red," he tells me over the phone. "I rushed home. On the way, I was thinking, Either she has cancer, or she's gay." (Obviously Craig isn't as clueless as he's sometimes portrayed to be.)
When he found out it wasn't cancer, "I hit the floor bawling," he says. "I was just so happy she wasn't going to die." Then came a wave of "sadness, confusion, and anger," he says. "I thought we had been doing things the right way. Both of us had been working on ourselves. We'd entered a phase that was supposed to be a new life for us. It was a shock. It felt like the end of the world."
But eventually, Craig says, he felt he had no choice but to accept his new reality. Glennon and Abby are, after all, "two women following their hearts," he says, slipping into Glennon-speak. "Isn't that what life is all about? Finding true love? If Glennon is happy, and Abby is happy, and the kids are thriving, what's wrong with that?" Now he shares joint custody of the children with Melton, and he recently accepted a new job in technology sales.
Of course, you can't please everybody. As her star has grown, Melton has gotten zinged for nursing a fame addiction, promoting a cult of personality, and cashing in with warrior-themed merch on her Zazzle store. The snark slingers who post on the GOMI (Get Off My Internets) forum have been particularly unkind to Melton, calling her "Glomastery," and "Our Lady of Internet Magic." Her critics accuse her of having a messiah complex and of trying to "SWF" Gilbert (who also left her longtime partner, José Nunes, for a woman, Rayya Elias, last year). "She's a textbook dry drunk, and she's replaced alcohol with validation," proclaims one commenter. Melton's holiday gift guide, replete with Love Warrior T-shirts and tote bags, nearly brought down the GOMI server: As one commenter put it, "Nothing says, 'This made me think of you' like wearable advertising for a book about a crappy marriage."
While Melton is a member of the United Church of Christ, a progressive denomination whose charter welcomes "persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions," her divorce and switch in sleeping arrangements has not endeared her to Christian traditionalists. ChristianityToday, the highest-circulation magazine for evangelical Christians, ran not just one but two scathing editorials against Melton, castigating her "adoring fans" for embracing her "gospel of self-fulfillment." The Christian Post newspaper quoted a minister who called her a "false prophet" and said he would pray for her: "Please, I beg you, stop claiming a relationship with Jesus, while claiming a homosexual relationship with another woman."
Speaking of which: "Let's just say I've got the sex thing all figured out now," Melton says, back at her Naples home. "Like, I get what the big deal is. I get why people love sex so much." She pauses, searching for the right words. "Sex is a tricky thing for me to talk about because I don't have the right language to use. But I'll just say that it's gone from being the thing I understand the least to one of the things I value the most. And it's gone from something that had a lot of shame tied up in it to being the most beautiful and pure thing in my life."
Wambach, a pumped-up, 5'11" Valkyrie in Dri-FIT, emerges pantherlike from the bedroom to say hello on her way to the gym. She plants a kiss on Melton and grabs her keys, but before she can get very far, Melton has a honey-do: Would she mind taking her dresses to the dry cleaner? Moments later, as the now-retired Olympian and World Cup champion staggers out the door, her arms loaded with Melton's brightly patterned frocks, Melton leans forward on the sectional, clutching her bare toes. "This is our life," she says earnestly. "You would think it would be more exciting than working out and going to the dry cleaner. But this is our life. And I feel joy. I actually feel so much joy."
She's equally enthused about her new role as a pillar of the progressive opposition movement. Since leaving Craig for Wambach—who stumped for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and has been an advocate for women's equality and LGBTQ causes—Melton has recast herself as a leader of the Christian resistance to Trump. "It's one of the best parts of our relationship," Melton says. "We wake up in the morning, and we literally say to each other: 'Coffee and revolution.' "
To that end, Melton has stopped blogging about floor crap and started blogging about Black Lives Matter and the need for intersectionality. These days, when she reminds her followers that they "can do hard things," she's not talking about scraping Play-Doh off the rug but about helping children in Aleppo—or calling your congressperson. "I realized I didn't just want to parent children in my own little home, but to mother the whole world," Melton says. "What's the point of gaining influence if you're not going to use it?"
Through Together Rising, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that grew out of the Momastery community, Melton has managed to raise an impressive $7 million, roughly half of which has gone to refugees and half to women in crisis in the U.S.
Which is not to say she's stopped chronicling her own family. Indeed, in that realm things appear to be sunnier than ever. "People keep telling me it can't happen," Melton says, grinning and shaking her head. "Yet we are able to have this peaceful co-parenting, co-family existence." Her Facebook page is crammed with blended-family birthday breakfasts, home-cooked dinners for six, even a special Christmas tree ornament—a gift from Craig—that depicts a family of six penguins (three adults and three children) in matching holiday scarves. Melton and Wambach have announced their engagement, with a Facebook post showing off two very sparkly engagement rings, and this spring, Craig and Abby are co-coaching middle child Tish's soccer team.
All of this has led to a new charge against her: that she is sugarcoating divorce and its aftermath. "As someone who actually walked that, it's bullshit," says one of my divorced friends. "It just seems reckless and irresponsible, because there are so many women following her like sheep."
"She puts a knot in my stomach," says couples therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, whose latest book is called Healing From Infidelity. "I can't count how many times I hear women quoting her when they come into my office. On the positive side, she wants to empower women. But the fact is, most people don't do divorce all that well, especially when children are involved. She's strengthening their conviction that they need to get away from their husbands, instead of learning to work through challenging issues. Sometimes you have to be a warrior to stay."
Melton is incensed by the suggestion that her very modern family is just her latest example of "brutiful"—a half-decade-old Glennon coinage for her messy-happy domestic life. "Too perfect?" she cries. "Isn't it hilarious to say 'perfect' after this freaking treacherous journey that we've all had?" She rises to her feet. "I know people think, and especially women think, that truth can only be found in suffering. But I've done that! I was a bulimic drunk! I am someone who refused to find any meaning outside of suffering. And I'm just not going to do it anymore." She rakes her hand through her hair. "This will be one of the challenges with my community. They love me when I'm jacked up, when everything's falling apart. They love me when I'm weak. Can they love me when I'm actually happy? We'll see."
So far, so good. More than a quarter-million people have watched the Facebook Live webcast Melton filmed on January 28, the day after the White House's Muslim travel ban was announced. In it, she sits cross-legged on her kitchen floor, a corona of golden curls surrounding her head. "Issues like refugee care can seem so overwhelming," she says. "But we're going to do this thing that I learned when I first got sober. We're just going to do the next right thing together." Melton's superpower is her ability to cast the pushback against Trump in the soothing tones of the recovery movement, leavened by a bracing dose of motherly practicality. It's a new model for protest politics: activism as self-care. "I've been so scared," Melton says, reading a comment from a viewer. "I know. Me too. It's okay to be scared," she replies in almost a whisper. "We'll tell fear it can come along with us in our minivan, okay? But we'll just tell fear it can't drive." She fluffs her hair. "Sometimes we'll tell it to not even talk. Like when we tell our kids, 'Enough. No words.' We're going to play the quiet game with fear. Fear is not the boss of us."
The "likes" and "loves" dance across the screen as she speaks. "What you are doing now is helping us parent on a global level," writes one commentator. "Christ himself was extremely political," adds another. "Keep fighting the good fight, Glennon!" "I know this isn't important," writes a third viewer. "But your hair looks so pretty curly!"
Melton says she'll start writing her third book, which she calls "part manifesto, part call to action," later this year. "She didn't mean to, but she built Noah's Ark before the flood," says powerhouse agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. "Everyone has a unique purpose, and Glennon's is to use the power of storytelling and community to change the world. That is not an overstatement."
"What you're going to see from Glennon in the next few years is the rise of one of the most important female leaders our culture is going to have," Elizabeth Gilbert says. "I think she's the next Gloria Steinem."
Melton's followers are even urging her to run for president. And the Leading Leader doesn't take her followers lightly: "Because of what my life has shown me, I will never say 'never' to anything anymore," she tells me. "If it ever got to the point where that was clearly what my family, my community, and my country needed, sure. I'd do it."
It's jarring to suddenly hear the mommy-meltdown artist and radical truth-teller speak in the stilted cadences of a candidate. It's as if Lucille Ball drank a gallon of mercury and became all prim and proper. But none of us should be surprised by Melton's capacity for self-transformation. After all, the most powerful women in our culture have always had a preternatural ability to shape-shift, to adapt and reconfigure themselves to meet the needs of the time. Think of Madonna, or Hillary Clinton. "Life is like playing with those little Russian nesting dolls that pop out of each other one at a time," Melton wrote in 2011. "Just when you think there can't be any more versions of yourself...look! There's still more."
