Oh, this book. It made me want to trust someone. Further, it also made me want to be that trusted person, as I have been historically in life, for people I care deeply and madly for. (I used to think I might be a good therapist, so often did friends in college and in my 20s and early 30s come to me with their secrets, shortcomings and quandaries.)

If you ever find yourself reading and absorbing a book that feels so right for you and your frame of mind, at the right time, perhaps even in the right place, you know how this one captivated and intrigued and stirred up in me the sweet resolve to do life differently.

I hadn't delved into any of Doyle's books before, though I had little reason to do so. A couple of them were about the trials, travails and triumphs of Christian marriage, which was her calling card as a speaker and author for some time. Now her opportunities as a self-described "clinical depressed inspirational speaker" have to do with her fate-tilted life as it is now: She's a mom (and a sports mom at that), a spiritual person if not an outright believer, a lesbian and again a wife. She and the retired soccer star Abby Wambach make for quite a pair, and their conversations are funny, poignant and reassuring (as in, that my own union has great chances to make it, based on the things they/we argue over and discuss at length).

Doyle can be unsparing, unflinching in her approach to setting scenes in which she and others (namely Abby, or a friend, or her ex-husband Craig Melton, who blessed her writing of this book) come out far less than blameless. In which their humanness or fallenness or whatever the hell you want to call it are called out on the carpet by trusted others.

I always enjoy writers talking about or with other writers, and Doyle's exchanges with Elizabeth Gilbert are quite amusing and in service to others of us who imagine such literary but also real and engaging friendships and conversations. We each need that pal who will drop everything, come stay for a few days and talk deep into the night.

Well before it was over, this autobiographical-meets-motivational tome made me want to be a better person, writer, spouse, son, brother, friend, listener, philanthropist and more. It made me want to ask someone what's wrong, to sit with someone in need, to act on my "Knowing" (as Doyle terms it). That's what I came to it for, and that's what I finished it feeling. I couldn't have asked for more. Indeed, I am a goddamn cheetah.