Glennon Doyle Melton: Broken Lives, Courageous Living

Glennon Doyle Melton spoke Oct. 18, 2016, at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis. Click the audio player above to listen to her talk.

Glennon Doyle Melton is founder of the Momastery blog and online community.

She's written two best-selling memoirs, "Carry On, Warrior" and "Love Warrior."

She founded a nonprofit organization, Together Rising, to raise money and support for women and children in vulnerable situations.

Much of her writing, speaking and nonprofit work has focused on a life that is "brutiful." She writes:

Life is brutal. But it's also beautiful. Brutiful, I call it. Life's brutal and beautiful are woven together so tightly that they can't be separated. Reject the brutal, reject the beauty. So now I embrace both, and I live well and hard and real.

For years, Doyle Melton has written about the brutal and the beautiful in her life: Her struggles, her family, her work, her marriage. This summer, her story got even more brutiful: She and her husband decided to separate.

The experience — of infidelity, love and commitment — became the basis for her latest memoir, "Love Warrior." Oprah quickly added it to her book club reading list.

Last month, The Washington Post wrote:

The world can be divided into two groups: those who've never heard the name Glennon Doyle Melton, and those who know pretty much everything there is to know about her. The bulimia and the alcoholism, the anxiety, depression and drugs. They know the contents of her refrigerator, how she looks when she first wakes up, where she finds God and what she says in response to her 8-year-old daughter's mid-dinner inquiry about how babies are made. (Prayer alone doesn't cut it, she explains .)

The number of people who know these things about Doyle Melton is not insignificant. She's a writer whose publicity team estimates that her blog and social media posts reach 7 million readers a week. And that camp is about to get a lot bigger.

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