Love Warrior: A Review

My review of Love Warrior by
Glennon Doyle Melton

This past November I read the book Love Warrior, a memoir by author Glennon Doyle Melton. I was so impressed with her story that I decided to give it a second read. Halfway through this second reading, I learned online that the author had recently divorced her husband and was now dating soccer superstar Amy Wambach. I was saddened to hear the news. I cannot pretend to know what ultimately happened or led her to that decision. I can only take a guess.

I say I was saddened because one of the most important episodes in Melton’s book is the courageous story she narrates about how she and her husband did everything they could to save their marriage after struggling with their respective addictions and embarking on the path to recovery. By the grace of God, they literally pulled their relationship back from the dead and it seemed by the end of the book that the worst chapter of their life together had been, against all odds, almost completely overcome. That second half of my second reading of the book felt different for several reasons, but that fact doesn’t take away from the impactful story of the Love Warrior.

Melton’s story will threaten the reader in a good way. She appropriately begins her story with a quote by 13th century Muslim poet Rumi, “You’ve seen my descent. Now watch my rising.” From that moment on the author goes on a relentless and unashamed journey of redemption that takes us from painful deep valleys while making repeated and necessary stops at the wells of grace and on to peaks of surrender and restoration.

Melton seems to have a natural ability to connect with her readers effortlessly. Her words and images, her story, her experiences are painfully real. She doesn’t spare us the good, the bad and the ugly. Rather, she dishes them for us in all their blunt realness. When I finished reading the book the first time around, I thought to myself, “This woman has an extraordinary brand of courage.” Her vulnerability is brutal and leaps off the page in such a way that you can almost grasp it. If there was a book that would let you read or, better yet ,see the author’s soul, this would be it.

There is a chapter in which the author finds herself at one of her lowest moments and she goes to see a priest. The conversation between them has an eviscerating effect. It is without a shred of exaggeration one of the saddest encounters ever written about. The Virgin Mary also plays an important role in the Love Warrior. The author’s reflections on Mary are powerful and insightful.

In Love Warrior you will read the real story of a broken woman and the broken man who loves her, and in sharing it, Melton lets you find out that her story is also the story of broken people at large and the perfect God who loves each one of them unconditionally. You will find out that the book is about parenthood, but also about friendship. Love Warrior is about need and longing, but also about how to quench them. It is about addiction and the road to recovery. The story will threaten you with its intimacy and will challenge you to consider, evaluate and cherish your most precious relationships. It places logistics under connection and puts meaningfulness over superficiality.

Melton has drawn a huge following among women readers. It is after all a gal telling her story, which deeply resonates with other gals. At face value, it might seem easy for guys to dismiss this book. But interestingly, Love Warrior is also a story for men. That’s one of the great things about the book and it will take guys by surprise. In telling us about her past relationships, she deals superbly with the unavoidable question of the meaning of manhood. What makes a man? Who decides that? The author doesn’t get into sociological diatribes. She instead skillfully deconstructs our cultural perception of manhood and the toxicity that it impinges upon both men and women alike from very early on in life. She cuts right thru it like a hot knife cuts through butter. Hers is not a feminist indictment against men, but a critique of what we socially encourage and promote as accepted norms for men.

Melton doesn’t hide from us the ugly struggle with addiction that her husband deals with and that almost brought them to the point of no return. And in her story, he doesn’t hide his fear of losing the woman he imperfectly loves. He doesn’t take the easy way out. He decides to go the way of the Love Warrior and learns little by little, and with a lot of help, how to love his woman the way she must be loved. If you’re a guy reading this and decide to give the Love Warrior a try, you’ll be in for a pretty good lesson, one worth having.

Finally, Love Warrior will let you in on the triumph of grace and love. Yes, those gifts without which there are no stories to tell, no redemption to speak of and no forgiveness to give and to receive. There’s a phrase Melton uses a few times in her story as her surrender takes her to embrace the fact that the path to recovery is impossible without reliance on God’s love and the love of others, “I was born for this.” It sounds like a self-help mantra, a sort of mind-over-matter axiom, and there's a degree of that in her memoir, but Melton does not fool herself and us. We were made for this love that we cannot receive on our own because it’s a gift of heavenly grace.

Broken

My son broke his right hand last Friday. He punched somebody in the face. A friend and teammate, no less. I was in the parking lot, asleep in my car, waiting for his soccer practice to end when he woke me up to tell me that the coach wanted to talk to me. I wasn't shocked, but surprised to learn of the incident. 

A couple days later the swelling in his hand hadn’t gone down so a visit to the ER was required. The diagnosis revealed a “closed nondisplaced fracture of neck of third metacarpal bone of right hand”. Quite a neat way to describe a broken bone. The fracture was hard to spot on the X Ray, but there it was regardless. We wouldn’t have known otherwise, but the swelling in his hand was a clear indication that something was wrong and parts of his palm were purple. Not only that. His hand was in pain, which is to say that he was in pain. A tiny, barely noticeable fracture was the root of all the symptoms manifesting in his right hand.

Interestingly, my son fought this visit to the ER quite emphatically. “I’m fine. I don’t need to go to the doctor! I’m fine!”, he repeated opening and clenching his fist to prove it. Proving it only went so far as my gently pressing his hand to see where it hurt the most. Ouch! Fine he was not.

At the end of the ER visit my son’s hand was in a splint. A day later and after a visit to the bone doctor, in a hard cast. He'll be carrying the extra weight for four weeks. The cast is not part of him, but without it he would not be well. He still claims he didn’t need any of it. The ER visit or the splint or the cast. He was fine. Funny kid. I can’t help to think that somewhere in there lies the story of humanity. Should I say a *broken* humanity?