This was such a good book! It was published all the way back in 1992 and was highly acclaimed at that time — in addition to becoming a bestseller, it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Given how well-known it was, it is surprising to me that I hadn’t read it until now. It is exactly the kind of novel I best appreciate — where the focus is on the story, told without any literary flourishes. And the story is so powerful that the storytelling does not get in the way of the story. This book may not have won any literary awards for the masterful use of language, but boy, does it pack a punch.

The book is narrated in first person by the protagonist, Dolores Price, and charts her life all the way from adolescence to when she is an older adult. She comes from a broken home, and in addition to that trauma, she is raped as an adolescent. She turns to eating (a lot) as a coping mechanism, and by the time she reaches high school, she is over 250 pounds. Bullying in high school is pernicious even for regular kids, and with her weight, it is aggravated to the point of being unbearable. The situation only gets worse in college, which her mother forces her to enroll in and attend. Dolores almost ends up committing suicide next to a whale that has washed up on shore in Cape Code to die. (She feels a strange kinship with whales, and not just because of her size.)

As it turns out, she is saved and sent to a mental health facility, where she spends several years getting psychiatric treatment that turns out to be actually effective. She even loses all the extra weight that had defined her for so long. But it’s not that she’s completely cured of all her neuroses. Her psyche is still badly damaged and even though she is able to live a somewhat normal life — she finds a job, rents an apartment, and even gets married (for a while) — the scars of her trauma are still there, and drive her to do things and make decisions that are questionable. She continues to struggle, and so do we with her, thanks to the power of the writing. She does eventually persevere and find some peace and happiness, but it is a long ride. And throughout it all, what really sustains her are the strong bonds she makes with a few people in her life, most poignantly her friendship with a gay teacher she had in high school who she reconnects with as an adult, and whom she nurses when he is ill with AIDS.

She’s Come Undone is so beautifully written that you can viscerally feel every painful moment, every slight, every feeling of despair, every kindness, and every small triumph that Dolores experiences as if it were your own. It is so detailed that you feel like you have gone on the long journey of her life with her, every step of the way. And is so authentic that it is hard to believe that this is a work of fiction and not a memoir. In that respect, it reminded me of A Little Life, another book that I love. I am almost afraid to read another book by Wally Lamb, so that it doesn’t spoil She’s Come Undone for me.

She’s Come Undone
Author: Wally Lamb
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: August 1992

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.