This is the month I realized that I need to pick up non-fiction more often because I’ve fallen in love with it. I unintentionally ended up reading two books that talked about women empowerment but what was so impactful about these two reads is that they’ve tackled it in different ways. Glennon dove deep into the ocean and kept diving, tackling all these layers of the ocean we know are there but don’t acknowledge. Melinda Gates instead took us on a trip across the surface of the ocean, giving us a surface level exploration to different areas of the ocean above. In other words, Glennon’s exploration on this topic was depth heavy, it demanded introspection. Gates’ approach was more expansive in the sense that it touched many different topics.

Glennon analyzed the why’s in a more literary sense with powerful writing and metaphors. She forced introspection. Gates on the other hand threaded her message through different anecdotes from all around the world. She forced us to look outwards at the women tucked away in different corners of society.

“The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World” – Melinda Gates

I always heard how big the Gates foundation and how it’s such an impactful force in terms of charity and advocacy in the world. While this book wasn’t just about the rise of their foundation, we got to see the company and their mission grow alongside Gates’ anecdotes and her travels. It was really interesting to see how much data, research, and analysis goes into running a organization with a mission like theirs and one of such a big magnitude.

The Moment of Lift is written from Melinda Gates POV. It’s her telling the story but it’s not all her stories. A lot of this book consists of anecdotes from women all around the world, women from the silicon valley to women in Africa, India, Asia, and elsewhere. This book gave voice to many stories that many of us are unaware of. I do strongly suggest to look up trigger warnings before going into this book. Some things that you may want to look into beforehand include abortion, loss of a child, suicide, genital mutilation, rape, sexual harassment,  underaged marriage, forced arrange marriages, and more.

I loved hearing snippets of Melinda’s life and her journey to realizing the importance of empowering women. We got to see her as a new hire at Microsoft, a newly wed/mother doing a brunt of the research for an organization, and then realizing that in order to make real change, to put a voice in her beliefs, that she needed to join the front side of the army. She needed to go public. I loved how she recognized that her beliefs and her mission may alienate her from institutions she was raised in, such as her religious community who don’t believe in family planning or birth control. She knew that she was just another white womxn with way too much money going around the world, saying she’s trying to help people.

I appreciated how she recognized this, was alarmed by it, but she addressed it and continued her journey. She took the fire and continued on because she realized how important her work is.

This book starts off and is centered around womxn. But the one major element that was continuously brought up is the importance of accessible birth control and family planning. We all know in the back of our minds that birth control and family planning are imperative for a society that empowers women but with all the stories, data, and analytics, Gates really dove into how big of a deal accessibility is. The lack of birth control and family planning isn’t just harmful to the women in a society, it’s damaging to the entirety  of a society.  Gates stated a fact that a country that has proper accessibility to birth control and family planning is more economically advanced than countries that don’t. The ECONOMY people. That’s math saying that the more rights women have, the better a country does, the more economical benefits it funnels in, the more opportunities people in the country have because of the economic growth.

Some of the anecdotes we hear are just down right heart breaking and may be triggering for some people. But if you’re open to reading them, I think it’s so important to read stories like this, not just those in this book, but in other works of art, whether it be documentaries, podcasts, fiction, or non-fiction.

As mentioned before, seeing the foundation’s growth was quite interesting. We got to see different projects rise and take off and how many people all around the world are benefiting from the Gates’ advocacy. I didn’t know that they involved themselves in so many things such as investing in seeds that will help farmers reach a better harvest or building community centers for sex workers to converse and find a community in a world they’re ostracized in.

Seeing the development process behind these projects was very interesting and educating Going into the project, the project team members/ Gates foundation assumed to help solve this one problem. But when they interview and work with the people they’re trying to help and hear their stories, they realize that the huge overwhelming problem that they’re trying to fix may not be what should be the project’s mission. In fact, some of the projects had to adjust their intentions to narrow down on a much smaller problem to solve and because of aiding in solving that one small problem they were able to not only fix the big problem they had intended initially to help with, but the society as a whole. It caused more problems/issues to be addressed in the society by the society’s people themselves.

The methodology used in these projects and how they narrowed down on their mission statements is imperative in educating us that small changes do matter.

If you aren’t one for charity, donations, or helping people, this book does an amazing job in showing you why it’s necessary. If you’re vary that your donation or contribution (fiscal or non-fiscal) may not be enough, then this book shows you that helping just one person, can change an entire society. There are many stories in this book of how one person who got help, came back to their home town/village and improved their society, and then moved onto help another village and so on. And other villages heard about all these other villages that are changing and they too changed. It’s magnificent. So on and so forth, women were empowered, people were heard, and safer and more inclusive societies were starting to form.

This book gives us many resources within the Gates’ foundation and some outside of their work that are good ways to help others. If anything, this book showcases many different avenues we can focus our attention on donating to, advocating for, or sharing  resources about.

“Untamed” – Glennon Doyle

You guys. This book changed my life. I am in love with Glennon Doyle’s writing. I’m going to have a whole review up just for this book where I will continue to express my deep seated love for everything that is Untamed. Long story short, this book is a memoir full of different snippets of Glennon’s life.

For those of you who don’t know Glennon Doyle, she’s an author who writes a bunch of memoirs. I believe she used to have a mom blog but I don’t know if that’s still a thing. Glennon Doyle has been through sooooo much. Glennon used to be an alcoholic and also simultaneously suffered with bulimia. When she fond out she was pregnant with her first child, she cut everything cold turkey, married the baby’s father, and started feeling the feelings she was drinking , binging, and purging away. Her first memoir, is all about her recovery from both alcoholism and bulimia and being reacquainted with her feelings. Her second memoir is about finding out that her husband has been cheating on her, for many years throughout their marriage, and how she rebuilt her family and saved her marriage.

Now, her third memoir, Untamed, is the exact opposite. It’s about her divorcing her husband, finding the love of her life, a womxn named Abby Wambach, and destroying the concept of a caged in version of a womxn that society has tamed us to be, with all the jaw dropping metaphors you could imagine. She questions her faith that tells her she’s immoral for loving a womxn. She questions the society that tells her she should just stay with the man who cheated on her because she can’t break up her family.

She questions.

This book honestly had me shook in so many ways. She sees the oppression of womxn in society in so many ways that are RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. She breaks down how we’ve been indoctrinated to cage ourselves in, in such a beautiful and powerful ways. It’s hard to summarize this book because it touches on so many things. It talks about feelings, depression, anxiety, what a mother’s supposed to be, a daughter’s supposed to be, a wife’s supposed to be, a womxn’s supposed to be, race, homophobia, societal biases, and so much more.

The sequence of how her memoirs are published has me thinking all the deep thoughts. As a reminder, Glennon Doyle announced her divorce just before her second book, all about saving her marriage, came out. This just has me mind spinning and has me looking at memoirs in such a new light because memoirs are all about life. And life changes so fast in ways that we don’t even see coming. This womxn straight up thought she saved her marriage and found out that nope, she’s not meant to be with him, she’s not going to let society guilt her into staying something that’s painful for her, and that she does indeed love a womxn. She had no idea when she was writing her first book about having her first child that her partner was going to cheat on her, that she was going to fall in love with a womxn, she had no idea. I think it’s crazy vulnerable to be publishing memoirs about your life as it unravels. It’s brave and unintentionally accommodating for other fellow messy humans who are on this journey of existing in the unknown.

I think that’s also why memoirs are so subjective. I think that memoirs sometimes just click for a certain person and at a certain time in our lives. If you’re not the target audience or don’t like the writing as much, you may not enjoy them as much as someone else might. That being said, I think that memoirs are an important genre to explore so we can hear stories that we don’t know. They can be very educational.

Another thing to know, this may not be for everyone because they may not appreciate reading a book that questions faith/religion but my oh my I for one loved this. I heard that some people found this book to sound preachy/self help like and I personally didn’t read it that way. I can see why it sounds like that and I personally didn’t mind it? I think everyone has their definition/boundaries when it comes to reading something that may be self-help/preachy and this book didn’t cross that boundary for me. Again, if you’re not a target audience or someone who can relate to some of the content, you may not enjoy it as much but personally, this book found me in the right time.