Glennon Doyle Melton built a devoted readership through intensely personal, emotionally direct writing about identity, motherhood, marriage, recovery, faith, and the hard work of becoming fully yourself. In books such as Carry On, Warrior, Love Warrior, and Untamed, she blends memoir, reflection, and encouragement in a voice that feels both confessional and rallying.
If what you love most about Glennon Doyle is her candor, her emphasis on truth-telling, and her mix of vulnerability and empowerment, these authors offer a similar kind of reading experience—whether through memoir, essays, psychology, spirituality, or women-centered personal growth.
Brené Brown is one of the clearest matches for readers who appreciate Glennon Doyle’s emotional honesty. A researcher known for studying vulnerability, shame, courage, and belonging, Brown writes in a way that makes complex emotional patterns feel immediately understandable and deeply human.
Her book Daring Greatly explores how people protect themselves from disappointment and judgment by avoiding vulnerability—only to discover that real connection requires openness. Brown combines research findings with stories from everyday life, making her work feel practical rather than abstract.
If you liked Glennon Doyle’s insistence that freedom begins with telling the truth, Brown offers a similarly powerful framework for living with more courage, self-compassion, and authenticity.
Elizabeth Gilbert writes about reinvention, longing, creativity, and the search for a life that feels genuinely lived. Like Glennon Doyle, she has a gift for taking deeply personal experiences and shaping them into reflections that resonate with a wide audience.
Her best-known memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, follows a year of change after divorce as she travels through Italy, India, and Bali. The book is about much more than travel: it is an exploration of grief, desire, spiritual hunger, and the difficult process of rebuilding a self after upheaval.
Readers who respond to stories of personal transformation, especially those centered on women reclaiming their own inner authority, will likely find Gilbert a compelling companion to Doyle.
Cheryl Strayed writes with striking emotional clarity about loss, self-destruction, and the painful path toward healing. Her work carries the same rawness that makes Glennon Doyle’s memoirs so affecting, but with a slightly leaner, more literary style.
In Wild, Strayed recounts hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone after the death of her mother and a period of personal collapse. The physical journey becomes inseparable from the emotional one, as she confronts grief, regret, and the possibility of beginning again.
What makes Strayed especially memorable is her refusal to soften her mistakes or simplify recovery. If you value memoirs that are brave, unsparing, and ultimately hopeful, she is an excellent next read.
Rachel Hollis writes in a highly motivational, conversational style about confidence, ambition, and challenging limiting beliefs. While her tone is more overtly self-help oriented than Glennon Doyle’s, readers often connect with both authors because of their directness and their focus on women stepping into fuller, more intentional lives.
In Girl, Wash Your Face, Hollis structures the book around common lies women tell themselves—about worth, success, motherhood, relationships, and identity—and responds with personal stories and energetic encouragement.
If what you’re looking for is a fast-paced, accessible read that pushes readers to stop shrinking, stop apologizing, and take action, Hollis may appeal to you.
Jen Hatmaker combines humor, memoir, cultural commentary, and spiritual reflection in a voice that feels warm, sharp, and highly relatable. Like Glennon Doyle, she often writes about womanhood, identity, family life, and the tension between who we are expected to be and who we actually are.
Her book Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire is centered on self-definition—especially for women who are tired of shrinking themselves to fit religious, social, or gendered expectations. Hatmaker writes with wit, but she also makes room for real anger, disappointment, and longing.
Readers who like Glennon Doyle’s blend of candor, feminism, and emotional accessibility will probably enjoy Hatmaker’s work, especially if they also appreciate a little humor with their introspection.
Shauna Niequist writes gentler, quieter books than Glennon Doyle, but the overlap is strong for readers drawn to thoughtful personal reflection. Her work often centers on rest, belonging, hospitality, spiritual recalibration, and the challenge of stepping away from performance-driven living.
In Present Over Perfect, Niequist reflects on burnout, overcommitment, and the pressure to constantly achieve. The book traces her movement toward a slower, more rooted life—one shaped less by productivity and more by presence, relationships, and peace.
If Glennon Doyle speaks to your desire for authenticity, Niequist may speak to your desire for spaciousness. She is a strong choice for readers who want introspection without losing warmth or hope.
Anne Lamott is a master of messy, humane, funny, deeply felt nonfiction. Long before the current wave of confessional memoir and essay writing, Lamott was writing candidly about addiction, motherhood, faith, depression, and grace in a voice that felt intimate and unvarnished.
Her memoir Operating Instructions chronicles her son’s first year and captures the exhaustion, terror, absurdity, and fierce love of early motherhood. Lamott’s work is especially effective because she is never interested in presenting herself as polished or spiritually finished.
For Glennon Doyle readers, Lamott offers many of the same pleasures: wit, spiritual searching, emotional honesty, and a compassionate willingness to admit how hard life can be.
Lori Gottlieb brings a therapist’s insight to memoir without losing readability or emotional immediacy. If you enjoy Glennon Doyle because she helps name difficult inner experiences, Gottlieb adds another dimension by showing how those experiences can be explored, interpreted, and transformed in therapy.
In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, she writes both as a therapist helping her patients and as a patient navigating her own heartbreak. The result is a deeply engaging book about grief, denial, self-deception, hope, and the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.
It is insightful, compassionate, and often surprisingly funny. Readers who like emotionally intelligent nonfiction with real narrative momentum should definitely consider Gottlieb.
Martha Beck writes at the intersection of memoir, life coaching, and spiritual self-inquiry. Her work is especially likely to resonate with readers who loved Untamed, since both Beck and Doyle are interested in what happens when a person stops living by external approval and starts living in alignment with inner truth.
In The Way of Integrity, Beck argues that much suffering comes from abandoning our deepest knowing in order to be accepted. Drawing in part on Dante’s Divine Comedy, she describes integrity as wholeness—the state of no longer being split between one’s inner self and outward performance.
Her writing is thoughtful, encouraging, and often practical. If you want a follow-up read that focuses explicitly on authenticity as a path to peace, Beck is a strong recommendation.
Tara Mohr is especially well suited to readers who connected with Glennon Doyle’s calls for women to trust themselves more fully. Her work is less memoir-driven and more instructional, but it shares a similar belief that many women have been conditioned to mute their voices, second-guess their instincts, and play smaller than they need to.
Her book Playing Big examines self-doubt, imposter syndrome, over-preparation, perfectionism, and the fear of criticism. Mohr offers practical tools for identifying the inner habits that keep women quiet and replacing them with a more grounded, expansive way of leading.
If you want an empowering next read with concrete takeaways for work, creativity, and everyday confidence, Mohr is an excellent choice.
Kristin Hannah is the outlier on this list because she is primarily a novelist rather than a memoirist or essayist. Still, readers who appreciate Glennon Doyle’s emotional intensity and focus on women’s inner lives may find a lot to love in Hannah’s fiction.
In The Nightingale, she tells the story of two sisters in occupied France during World War II, each navigating impossible danger in very different ways. The novel explores courage, sacrifice, trauma, love, and the hidden forms of strength women are often asked to carry.
If what draws you to Doyle is emotional depth and stories about female resilience, Hannah offers that in a sweeping fictional form.
Samantha Irby is a great pick for readers who want the honesty of memoir and personal essays but with a much sharper comedic edge. She writes about chronic illness, money, work, awkwardness, relationships, and the indignities of ordinary life with fearless specificity.
In We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Irby turns deeply personal material into essays that are both laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly vulnerable. She is especially skilled at revealing the loneliness, anxiety, and self-consciousness that often hide beneath humor.
While her sensibility is more irreverent than Glennon Doyle’s, both writers connect strongly with readers because they refuse to pretend they have everything figured out. If you like emotional openness with a darker comic streak, Irby is a terrific choice.
Nadia Bolz-Weber writes about faith, failure, grace, and redemption in a voice that is blunt, earthy, and radically welcoming. Readers who appreciate Glennon Doyle’s willingness to challenge religious expectations while still engaging spiritual questions may find Bolz-Weber especially compelling.
In Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, she tells the story of her journey from addiction and self-destruction to becoming a Lutheran pastor. The book is full of candid reflection, rough humor, and a deep belief that brokenness does not disqualify anyone from love or belonging.
She is particularly powerful on the subject of grace—not as sentimentality, but as something stubborn, disruptive, and real. For readers interested in faith writing that feels honest rather than polished, she stands out.
Sarah Bessey writes with warmth, conviction, and deep compassion about faith, feminism, motherhood, and spiritual reconstruction. Like Glennon Doyle, she appeals strongly to readers who are rethinking inherited beliefs and searching for a more expansive, humane understanding of themselves and the world.
Her book Jesus Feminist argues that feminism and Christian faith are not opposites but can be mutually illuminating. Bessey writes not as a detached critic but as someone who loves faith enough to question the ways it has excluded and diminished women.
Her tone is gentler than Doyle’s, but her themes often overlap: liberation, truth-telling, dignity, and the courage to imagine a different way of living.
Debbie Ford’s work speaks to readers interested in self-confrontation and inner wholeness. She writes about the parts of ourselves we reject—anger, jealousy, fear, selfishness, insecurity—and how denying those traits can keep us fragmented and stuck.
In The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, Ford argues that the qualities we most dislike in ourselves often contain important information about our wounds, needs, and unlived potential. Rather than trying to become flawlessly “good,” she encourages readers to become more integrated and honest.
That emphasis on self-acceptance makes her a meaningful recommendation for Glennon Doyle fans, especially those drawn to books about shedding shame and embracing a fuller, less performative version of the self.
