She's Come Undone

This book is about a woman being kicked down a hill again and again and hitting the bottom. Her life is crazy, her life is unfair. Dolores is very hate-able, very pitiable. She's a flawed woman, terribly flawed, her situations and experiences are awful and depressing, this book in general is awful and depressing.

Dolores is our main character, the book has us follow her from age four to forty. Her life is rife with bad sex, bad partners, obesity, abuse, loss, and her wondering how life can be any more shit, then slowly climbing back within the last chapter. It's messy, it's horrible, it's a book I thoroughly enjoyed because each kick was her rolling downhill, she'd hit the bottom and we'd have her kicked again, hemorrhoid cream from show more rough anal sex, crying all night and hating her reflection, people dying, her dreams gone, she sank and sank and sank until she floated.

This book isn't perfect, its characters are not perfect, nothing here is perfect, it's an ugly gaping mess coming undone. Woman problems written by someone who is not a woman but nailed even so. The pettiness, the karma, the resentment. This book brings out so much of the craziness of life, or the chaos. We never know how hard it just might hit us within a year, a week, a month, even a decade. Dolores is that person, and a very messy person at that! show less

It's true, Wally Lamb's talent for conveying a woman's inner life is uncanny. For the story of quite an ordinary person, this book took me to some very strange and uncomfortable places. But like many virtuosi, the author just can't resist taking it over the top. By about two-thirds of the way through I didn't have it in me to care about another plot twist or outrageous personality. I like an Oprah book once in a while, and this was a good one, but I wouldn't say it changed my life.

I really, truly, honest-to-god am not exaggerating when I say this is one of the worst books I ever read while I was an adult. Lamb hasn't written an actual story so much as he's bound together a series of advice columns and chat show episodes dressed up in vague narrative form. The girl's father leaves! Then she gets raped! Then she gains weight! Then her roommate is mean to her! Then she loses weight but hooks up with a bad boyfriend! Then some more bad things happen to her after that! And more still after that! And on and on, ad nauseam. Someone should have told Lamb that dreaming up parade of horribles isn't the same as writing a novel. Save yourself 500 pages and watch a couple episodes of Dr. Phil instead. Awful, awful, awful show more book. If I could give it less than one star, I would.

Addendum: Every so often, someone comes along and flags this review as having spoilers. Complaining about spoilers in this review is, not to put too fine a point on it, really stupid. Most of the plot points I mention here are either in the actual cover copy of the book, in the Goodreads summary, or occur somewhere within the first ten pages or so. The rest are so vague (e.g., hooking up with a bad boyfriend -- a plot point that probably occurs in some form in, oh, half of the books ever written) that if you consider them "spoilers," I'm not really sure why you read book reviews at all.

Further addendum: If you're about to complain about spoilers in this review, please see comment 55 below. If you're that hysterical about spoilers, maybe stop reading online reviews before you read the book. Also, the book was published well over 30 years ago and I think the statute of limitations has really run on this one. Rosebud was his sled!! show less

I don't generally go for tragic coming-of-age tales. I picked this one up because it was loved by several of my fellow BookCrossers. It is the story of Delores Price and her issues with food, sex, love, and mental health. I related in ways that made me uncomfortable, yet following Delores as she coped was heartening. It was also a surprisingly funny book, considering all the drama. I was completely and unexpectedly sucked in, couldn't put it down. Definitely recommended.

I'm not sure what made me pick up She's Come Undone and rip through it in less than two days, as I've always shied away from it before, thinking of it as one of those books about "Woman's Experience"--a topic which generally makes me cross (as if there could be such a thing). But I enjoyed She's Come Undone more than I expected to--the narrator's voice is engaging and pulls one right along, and Lamb creates characters and scenes seemingly effortlessly. The sentences read smoothly, and the novel is sophisticated in its movement. The final pages made me smile with happy satisfaction at the outcome of Dolores's story.

But something bothered me throughout my reading, and I'm still unsure of what, exactly, was the problem. Perhaps it was the show more relentless parade of wretched human beings in the book, people who seemed uninterested in, or incapable of, love in any of its guises and who were wholly uninteresting except in the specific ways they affected Dolores. Perhaps it was the wearying way nearly every man in the story was a misogynistic jerk. Or the disconnect I felt between the experience of Dolores, born in 1952 in Rhode Island, and my mother, born in 1951 in Pennsylvania. No reason, really, exists to think that two women of the same generation born in roughly the same part of the country would have similar experiences, but Dolores seemed to live in an entirely different world than the one my mother grew up in. Where were the kinds of good, loving, strong characters who inhabited Mom's stories of growing up in the fifties and sixties? Why was nearly every adult in Dolores's world so touched by and damaged by The Times In Which They Lived?

Or perhaps it was that the events of the novel began to feel like a checklist of Bad Things That Happen to Women (I'm going to get a touch spoilery here). Dolores witnesses verbal and physical abuse against her mother by her father; sees her parents go through a divorce caused in some part by her father's adultery; watches her mother have a nervous breakdown, spend time in a mental hospital, then come home and engage in an affair with a married man; flirts with a handsome neighbor and then is raped by him at thirteen and convinced by him that "their" indiscretion is her fault; becomes mentally depressed and morbidly obese; experiences the death of her mother in a horrible traffic accident; is maliciously and sexually teased by a boy at a college party who then calls her horrible names and destroys her property when she fights back; nearly commits suicide; spends four years in a mental institution; marries a man who threatens to leave her if she does not abort their child; has an abortion she does not want; gets a divorce; and eventually must give up on her dream of bearing children. While Dolores does learn to stand up for herself and eventually finds happiness; loyal, loving friends; and a good man (and the moments when she has these breakthroughs are satisfying and exciting), this litany of misery began to feel a touch dishonest. It is not that I disbelieve that all of these things could happen to one person (and I will say that Lamb deals with each one beautifully), but that I began to suspect that these events existed in the novel for reasons that had little to do with story. And that put me off a bit.

In the end, I was impressed by Lamb's handling of structure and sentences and, in some cases, character. But despite the satisfaction I felt in Dolores's eventual triumphs, I also felt manipulated by the novel. And that will always leave a sour taste in my mouth. show less

Never got around to reading this when it first came out 15-17 years ago, but on the recommend of another great reader friend, I picked it up for a road trip and didn't put it down until I finished it,! Whoa - what a roller-coaster ride of a coming-of-age novel. There's definitely no one like Dolores Price, and her troubled young life: her irreverence, her deep longing for a father who abandons both her and her mother; her naiveté about the adults in her life, her struggles to feel like she belonged -anywhere-just like any adolescent girl, her searing trauma of rape at 13 years old, and her desperate attempts to cope with the event is only compounded by the sudden accidental death of her mother. She's only able to break out of her self show more exile in her grandmother's home, (binge tv watching and eating herself into oblivion) when she gets on a bus and travels to the college her mother and sympathetic high school counselor had worked so hard to get her admitted to, in spite of Dolores' stubborn resistance. The painful struggles she experiences as one of the ten new college freshmen girls in her dorm- to fit in somehow, fat as she is- are sometimes cringe-worthy, but always genuine. After another humiliation by her roommate's intoxicated boyfriend on the dance floor at a college party, hapless Dolores falls into the clutches of yet another lonely, self seeking adult, intent on using her sexually. Ugh -that episode was definitely miserable to read but it does drive Dolores into a rage that leads her to a turning point. Will she destroy herself? She flees her college, and everything, everyone in her life, by embarking on a last ditch trip to Cape Cod, which culminates in her all night "watch" over a beached, dead whale at the shore's edge - a giant black behemoth - and her suicide attempt in the water next to it. This poignant, dreamlike treatment, contrasting her despair, and pain with the underwater ocean images is truly an original passage. The author deserves the kudos he's received for this book for chapters such as this - thankfully, Delores can't quite do herself in, and after she is found and taken to a psych hospital and then halfway house facility, we readers get to cheer her on as she discovers truths about herself, her past, and lose the crippling weight that has literally and figuratively dragged her down.
Her determined efforts to drive herself forward into "normal" adulthood, (as Dr. Shaw, her counselor had trained her: "Visualize your solutions! PIcture an answer to your problem. Then make the picture real.") sends her seeking out her roommate's teenage boyfriend (Dante) who she discovers is now a teacher in Montpelier, Vermont. Her romance with the now adult Dante, and their four year marriage is another leg of her growing up journey, and again we can foresee that Dolores' troubles can result in another psychological "crash", but she rights herself, with the help of several colorful characters from her old neighborhood. The loss of her grandmother brings more maturity and perspective to Dolores, and as we zig-zag with her through the early 80s, we know she's beginning to be the person she always could be. With all the great cultural references (rock n roll songs, the supposed death of Paul McCartney- Beatles references, Woodstock, more 70s rock, Watergate, the peace & love movement, the moon walk, the growing tragedy of AIDS) we have another foul mouthed, frustrated, always questioning female Holden Caufield in her own Catcher in the Rye, with a scope and reach that hearkens back to 19th bildungsromans. Dolores' life is a '70s version of other female protagonists as varied as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Weetzie Bat from Francesca Lia Block's eponymous 1989 y.a. novel but with a wider range of colorful, often eccentric characters, some kind, some bumbling,all a mix of sinster, self serving or ignorant. Sometimes too crass and explicit for my taste (or teen readers!), this book and especially Dolores Price becomes totally real, a woman we always root for, and who experiences (eventually! ) a redemptive present, brilliantly told with humor and razor sharp dialogue and description. show less

Wally Lamb is a relatively local author to me, he lives about an hour and a half away. I actually really love his books, though he writes contemporary fiction, which normally is NOT my thing at all. As a matter of fact, he's the only author I'll read in that genre!

This was actually a reread for me, which I enjoyed almost-but-not-quite as much as I did the first time, which was when the book first came out.

It's a coming of age story about a gal who grows up in a household with a distant father, a grandmother who cares but doesn't know how to show it, and a mother who battles her own mental illnesses and demons. Of course she can't help but to grow up to be a mess, too.

As I said, it's definitely not my usual read, but I enjoyed it all the show more same. You can't help but share Dolores pain, and you can't help but compare what she goes through with issues in your own life (which is why I don't like contemporary fiction; it can sometimes be too close to home, and I read to "forget" my life). show less