She's Come Undone [Mass Market Paperback]

Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1997: "Mine is a story of craving; an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered." So begins the story of Dolores Price, the unconventional heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Dolores is a class-A emotional basket case, and why shouldn't she be? She's suffered almost every abuse and familial travesty that exists: Her father is a violent, philandering liar; her mother has the mental and emotional consistency of Jell-O; and the men in her life are probably the gender's most loathsome creatures. But Dolores is no quitter; she battles her woes with a sense of self-indulgence and gluttony rivaled only by Henry VIII. Hers is a dysfunctional Wonder Years, where growing up in the golden era was anything but ideal. While most kids her age were dealing with the monumental importance of the latest Beatles single and how college turned an older sibling into a long-haired hippie, Dolores was grappling with such issues as divorce, rape, and mental illness. Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40. The troubled product of a stormy marriage, she is already sipping Maalox in grade school. Then her father walks out on her mother, who suffers a nervous collapse, and Dolores moves to her repressive grandmother's house in Rhode Island. By the time she reaches eighth grade, she has only one friend: a boarder who eventually rapes her. Anesthetizing herself with junk food and soap operas, Dolores becomes an obese, isolated young woman who attempts suicide during her first semester in college and spends seven years in a mental institution. Oddly enough, this relentless parade of disasters makes for interesting reading. The author keenly evokes his protagonist's profound alienation and self-loathing, endowing Dolores with a bleak sense of humor that keeps readers rooting for her. Ironically, the book itself "comes undone" as its heroine develops self-esteem, at which point an absorbing portrait of a woman on a collision course with her problems turns into a disappointing series of cliches about love, forgiveness and Dolores's ticking biological clock. Nonetheless, this is a promising debut.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

An award-winning creative writing teacher has created a compelling first novel whose heroine reflects on her troubled journey from childhood to middle age. Bruised by her parents' divorce, her mother's breakdown, and brutal betrayal by a neighbor, Dolores Price tries to retreat from life. Overwhelming anger and defiance frequently blind her to the needs of others, yet even in despair she battles for love and acceptance, supported by some delightfully unconventional friends. There are no simple solutions, but from the shattered remains of her dysfunctional family, she binds together a new beginning. Her struggles to understand pain and achieve forgiveness resonate with a sense of life's complexities. Dolores is not always likable, but her story combines sorrow and wonder in a remarkable way. Recommended for most fiction collections.
- Jan Blodgett, St. Mary's Cty. Records Ctr. & Archives, Leonardtown, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A tremendously likable first novel about the catastrophe- marked childhood, youth, and mangled adulthood of a tough-fibered woman who almost beaches herself in guilt and grief. Terrible things are about to happen to Dolores Price, only child of brittle, vulnerable Bernice and weak, randomly abusive Tony. Tony leaves Bernice sometime after the stillbirth of their son, and after a week playing with little Dolores in a new backyard pool, when the child expects a lifetime of floating with Daddy. Then Bernice completely flips out and goes to a mental hospital; Dolores is taken to live with Grandma in Rhode Island on Pierce Street (which ``smelled of car exhaust and frying food. Glass shattered, people screamed, kids threw rocks''). Later, Ma returns and works collecting tolls on the Newport Bridge, while friendless Dolores attends a corrosive parochial school. But all welcome Grandma's new tenant, dazzling Jack, a radio DJ who, when Dolores is 13, rapes her in a dog pound. The person Dolores runs to is heart-of-gold Roberta, empress of the Peacock Tattoo Emporium across the street. In spite of the strangled but loyal love of Ma and Grandma, the palship of Roberta, and the kindness of a gentle gay guidance-counsellor, Dolores is about to go under. She becomes a mountain of fat, and soon is convinced that she's responsible for the death of Jack's baby--but also of Bernice, who's killed by a car. At a Pennsylvania college, Dolores knows that her destiny is to ``kill what people love.'' There's some good psychiatry and a bad marriage before the peaceful and upbeat close. Lamb has a broad satiric touch with some satisfying fat targets (the warfare of Pierce Street, etc.). And in spite of hard, hard times and crazy coincidences, Dolores' career is a pleasure to follow, as she barrels through--with a killer mouth and the guts of a sea lion. A warmblooded, enveloping tale of survival, done up loose and cheering. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Glamour A heroine to cheer for....This supremely touching journey to adulthood may remind you of The World According to Garp and other sagas of emotional liberation.

People There are at least two surprises in store for readers of Lamb's memorable debut novel. One is the author's sex. This male writes so convincingly in the voice of a female, tracing her life from 4 to 40, that you have to keep looking back at the jacket picture just to make sure. The second surprise is how such a string of trials and tribulations can add up to such a touchingly funny book...

The New York Times An ambitious, often stirring and hilarious book.

In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years.

Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.

"Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered...."

Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly-up.

In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably lovable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections. She's Come Undone includes a promise: you will never forget Dolores Price. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Wally Lamb's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Pushcart Prize XV: Best of the Small Presses; The Best of the Small Presses; The Best of the Missouri Review; Streetsongs 1: New Voices in Fiction; Northeast and The New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction, and is a Missouri Review William Peden fiction prize winner. A nationally honored teacher of writing, and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA's Writing Program, Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife and their three children. He is also the author of I Know This Much Is True.

From Chapter 3

I was on the brown plaid sofa, watching TV and scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger, my mother was having her nervous breakdown.

Ma sat hunched over one of our fold-out TV trays, working constantly on a religious jigsaw puzzle without making any progress. She wore her knee socks and her quilted pink bathrobe, despite the early summer heat. She ate nothing but cubes of Kraft caramels. For two weeks, I had been reaching over and turning up the volume, trying as best I could to ignore the private curse words she'd begun chuckling to herself, trying not to see the litter of caramel cellophane that was accumulating around her chair in a kind of half circle.

It wasn't that Ma hadn't put up a fight. In Daddy's absence, she'd repainted the downstairs hallway and exercised in front of the TV with Jack LaLanne and cried and kicked the lawn mower until it eventually started. Her efforts at going it alone led her back to Sunday Mass and through a succession of brief jobs: convalescent-home cook, bank teller, notions-department clerk at Mr. Big's discount store. When winter cold burst one of our pipes, Ma called and called until she located the random yellow-pages plumber who got out of bed to come fix it.

But we'd done nothing about maintaining the pool the previous fall. Leaves had fluttered down onto the surface then sunk and rotted; by springtime, the pool water was brown soup.

One morning in May, Ma went downstairs and found Petey dead at the bottom of his cage. "Why me? Why always me?" she was still sobbing when I got home from school. She hadn't gone to work that day and didn't go the next day either. At the end of the week Mr. Big's called to say they were letting her go. By then she'd already begun living in her robe.

It was Ma's hair that finally got to me. At school I sucked breath mints and carried a small bottle of Tussy deodorant in my purse for whenever I could get my hands on the lavatory pass. Ma's unwashed hair, matted and crazy, alarmed me enough to suspend the cold war against my father and contact directory assistance in Tenafly, New Jersey.

It had been almost a year since my father's move to Tenafly where he'd opened a flower shop with his girlfriend, Donna.

"Good afternoon, Garden of Eden," Donna said. I had spoken to her only once before, phoning the day my parents' divorce became final to call her a whore. The two prevailing mysteries in my life were: what Donna looked like and why, exactly, my father had traded us for her.

"May I speak to Tony," I said icily. "This is his daughter, Miss Dolores Price."

When my father got on, I cut through his nervous chitchat. "It's Ma," I said. "She's acting funny."

He coughed, paused, coughed again. "Funny how?" he asked.

"You know. Funny peculiar."

Neither Donna nor I wished to live under the same roof, and neither the Nords nor my father would entertain my proposal that Jeanette and I live at our house for the summer and Mrs. Nord drive over with our meals and clean laundry. It was decided I would move to my grandmother's house on Pierce Street in Easterly, Rhode Island, until Ma got right again.

On the one-hour drive to Grandma Holland's, I clutched my notebook filled with addresses of girls from whom I'd forced promises to write me regularly. Daddy kept sneaking nervous peeks at me and at the rearview mirror. Behind us, the U-Haul trailer wobbled and swayed frost side to side. In silence I waited impatiently for the tragic highway accident that would paralyze me but wrench both my parents back to their senses. I pictured the three of us back home on Bobolink Drive, Daddy pushing my wheelchair solemnly up the front walk, eternally grateful for my forgiveness. At the doorway, Ma would smile sadly, her hair as clean and lustrous as a Breck-shampoo girl's.

Daddy didn't say much to Grandma. He deposited my bike and suitcases and cartons in the front foyer, kissed me on the forehead, and left.

Grandma and I were cautiously polite to each other. "Make yourself at home, Dolores," she said hesitantly as she opened the door to what had once been my mother's bedroom. The room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the hard mattress, it crackled under me. I tried to picture my mother in this room as a twelve-year-old girl like me, but all I could see was Anne Frank on the cover of her paperback diary.

With each trip up or down the front staircase, I watched the portrait of Eddie, my dead uncle. His blond hair was pushed up into a spiky crew cut. His eyes peeked out from beneath two bushy brows and followed my steps with eerie cheerfulness. His smile was almost a smirk, as if he might reach out from the frame and jab me in the ribs as I passed.

For supper we ate meat loaf and creamed spinach, the two of us sitting in a silence broken only by the occasional clink of fork against plate or Grandma's clearing her throat. When she got up to make herself some tea, she addressed the stove. "She's not cuckoo, you know," she said. "He's the one with the mortal sin on his soul, not Bernice."

That evening I thumbtacked my Dr. Kildare collage to the wall and unpacked my clothes. Grandma had placed little sachet pillows in the dresser drawers. As I yanked each drawer open, the smell of old ladies from church -- with their powdered wrinkly necks and quivery singing voices -- drifted up toward me. In the bottom bureau drawer I discovered a little red ink message hidden in a back corner, written right into the wood. "I love Bernice Holland," it said. "Sincerely, Alan Ladd." Twice during the night I put the light on and got out of bed to make sure it was still there.

Grandma turned her TV to thunderous volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an "Edge of Night" fan. Sometimes I'd grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with her, slurping intentionally from the bottle.

"I hope you don't sit like that in school," she said. "It's unladylike."

I thumbed through the TV Guide and reminded her I was on summer vacation.

"When I was your age at the Bishop School, I received a medal for deportment on Class Day. A girl named Lucinda Cote thought she was going to get it -- told me as much. She was a big piece of cheese, very stuck on herself. But no, they gave it to me. And here is my very own granddaughter who can't even sit correctly on a divan."

"What's a divan?" I said, swigging my Coke.

"A sofa!" she said, exasperated.

She watched in silent horror as I stuck my thumb over the Coke bottle opening and shook, then let the foam erupt into my mouth. "Can I turn the TV down?" I asked. "I'm not deaf, you know."

Evenings after the dishes, Grandma hobbled around the house with her frayed prayer book which was held together with rubber bands. Then she'd settle in front of the television to watch her westerns -- "Bonanza," "Rawhide" -- while I sat out at the kitchen signing corny get-well cards to Ma and pages of complaints to Jeanette.

In our first week together, Grandma told me it was a sin the way I wasted hot water, toilet paper, my spare time. She said she'd never heard of a girl who had reached my age without learning to crochet. I retaliated by shocking her as best I could. At breakfast, I drowned my scrambled eggs in plugs of ketchup. Evenings, I danced wildly by myself to my 45s while she watched from the doorway. It was mostly for Grandma's benefit that I mouthed the declarations of the girl singers: My love is like a heat wave...It's my party and I'll cry if I want to! One night Grandma wondered aloud why I didn't ever listen to singers who could carry a tune.

"Like who, for instance?" I scoffed.

"Well, like Perry Como."

"That old dinosaur?" I snorted.

"Well, how about the Lennon Sisters then? They can't be much older than you are."

I lied and told her one of her precious Lennon sisters -- Diane, the oldest, her favorite -- was having an illegitimate baby.

"Pfft," she said, flicking away the possibility with the flap of her wrist. But her lip quivered and she left my room making the sign of the cross.

Pierce Street smelled of car exhaust and frying food. Glass shattered, people screamed, kids threw rocks. "Jeepers Christmas," Grandma would mumble as cars squealed by at emergency speeds. She told me she had warned her husband, my grandfather, that they should follow the doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers who had moved out of the neighborhood after the war. But Grandpa had put it off and put it off and then, in 1948, had died, leaving her with teenage children and a two-family home with a leaky roof. "This house has been my cross to bear," she was fond of saying. She had come to see her staying on amongst the "riffraff" as the will of God. He had placed her here as a model of clean Catholic living. She was not obliged to speak to any of her neighbors, only to offer them her good example.

At dusk each evening, Mrs. Tingley, Grandma's third-floor tenant, clip-clopped down the side steps with her bug-eyed Chihuahua, Cutie Pie. "Come on, Cutie Pie, go poopy," Mrs. Tingley always said, while the dog circled nervously on his tether. In all the years Mr. and Mrs. Tingley had rented from my grandmother, Grandma had assumed hewas the drinker, not her. But after Mr. Tingley's death, the package-store man had kept pulling up to the curb as usual. My bedroom ceiling was Mrs. Tingley's bedroom floor. The only sound from above was the click of dog toenails, and I pictured Mrs. Tingley up there lying in bed, sipping in silence.

Across from Grandma's was a tin-roofed store divided in two. One half was a barbershop. The barber, a thin, jowly man, sat sadly at the window most of the day, reading his own magazines and waiting for customers. The other half was the Peacock Tattoo Emporium. It was run by a skinny, older woman with dyed black hair and red toreador pants. On my second afternoon at Grandma's, ...

Dolores Price is a smart-mouthed child who grows into a 257-pound, unhappy adult. Price's trials and misadventures are recounted in this tale, which is one of the books from Oprah Winfrey's reading list. Reading competently, Najimy does little to differentiate the characters. Still in her alternately quiet and strident telling of this story Najimy makes Price sound like a real person. M.B.K. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.