I'm astounded by the fact that so many people have such a visceral reaction about how much they hate this book. I've heard people dislike it because a lot of bad things happen to the narrator, and they find it overwhelming. But I've read a lot of reviews that specifically mention the "bonding with the whale"-part. First of all, it's not the best part of the book, but it's not terrible. Secondly, it lasts for 2, maybe 3 pages. Get over it.

I read this book when I was 17 years old and fell in love with it. Wally Lamb has a gift for writing in the female voice (upon my first reading, I had to check the front of the book a few times to make sure the author was, in fact, named "Wally"). The novel follows the life of Dolores Price, from the ages of 4 to 40. Many unfortunate things happen to Dolores including an eating disorder, emotionally abusive relationships (of all sorts), her mother's death, etc. These are not lone events, meant to bruise and batter the reader--all of the things that happen to Dolores are built upon one another to create a cohesive portrait of a woman undone. The book is not just sad, the main character not entirely without redemption--just as in real life. It is a wonderful novel and is worth everyone's time.

It's been years and I'm *still* mad that I can't get my time back from reading it.

I honestly don't know how I feel about this book. I remember loving I Know This Much Is True (even though if you ask me what the plot is I couldn't tell you) so kind of felt let down after reading this. I didn't hate the book but I can see why other people did. I think it's a hard book to read if you can't stomach flawed characters. For a lot of the book Dolores' actions made her unlikable even if the way she behaves is pretty human and understandable.

I know for other people the part of the plot revolving around her weight and the depiction of the lesbian character are what made this book off putting but I felt like the way people were treating Dolores because of her weight was pretty realistic especially for the time period its supposed to be happening in. I also didn't find Dottie to be some kind of predatory caricature, it felt like she was lonely and Dolores is the one who called her the night they have dinner at Dottie's place. I think that was a pretty nuanced depiction of how people who have been sexually assaulted before may end up in situations where they are likely to be coerced.

I personally found the whole therapy thing to be more off-putting especially the reparenting using the pool. I also felt like the whale metaphor/theme wasn't that well done, it wasn't poignant and I feel like the novel would have been unchanged without it. It also feels like the book dragged on like did we really need to follow Dolores for all of her life like that. The other wild thing to me was Dante's reaction, I feel like he should have been more freaked out when Dolores confesses to him.

I did find the book hard to put down though so clearly it's got that going for it. I don't regret reading it but I wouldn't say it was a pleasant experience.

Enjoyed this! It wasn't the best book I've ever read, but it was a heartbreaking story about a young woman who goes through so many trials in her life. From sexual assault to overeating and dealing with being an obese person. And choosing the wrong person to marry, Delores had a hard life. On the flip side, she was a strong person despite her choices and tribulations. I liked it! Beautifully written as well.

"She's Come Undone" is not the first book I've read about Wally Lamb. For those who are new to him, let me sum up my experience with his books.

Wally Lamb is an extremely talented writer. He draws on things that are familiar to him--namely, the 60s and how arbitrarily cruel life can be at times--and breathes a new life into them. Where most authors would have fallen back on a pile of cliches, Lamb manages to make each story enthralling. His characters are complex and three-dimensional. Many authors have one strength, but Lamb is a genius at both characterization and storytelling.

That said, my experience with his books has been mixed. As enthralling as the stories are, they can be extremely disturbing in a way that feels almost voyeuristic. In "We Are Water," for instance, a large chunk of the book is told from the point of view of a child molester. I'm not opposed to the idea, but his victim's body, and the things he does to her, are described in graphic detail. In "I Know This Much is True," the protagonist rapes his girlfriend in a flashback. He refuses to call what he did rape (even though very obviously was), and later, the whole incident is brushed aside with "We made up and made love." Really? That's it!?

When I picked up "She's Come Undone," I wasn't sure I would like it. This is the first book by Lamb that features a female protagonist. And, weighing around 240 pounds myself, I was concerned that this was going to be another story about a sad, fat woman whose weight loss lines right up with her getting her "real self" back.

As it turns out, I was right. But still, it was such a good story.

At age thirteen, Dolores and her mother are abandoned by her father; later, she is raped by an adult neighbor she was crushing on. Her life goes downhill from there; unable to healthily move through her grief (due to neither her mother nor her grandmother knowing how to help her), Dolores spends most of her time watching TV and eating junk food (because that's all fat people do, am I right?). When she reaches adulthood, she weighs 257 pounds. After attempting and failing to stay in college, Dolores goes up to Cape Cod and briefly considers suicide before her concerned family tracks her down. She is then committed to a psychiatric hospital. From then on, it's Lamb's typical montage of ups and downs as Dolores tries to make sense of her fickle life.

I had no problem with the story itself; I feel like it did what it set out to do. I feel that Lamb very accurately described different types of abuse and neglect, as well as well-meaning people who don't know what to say or do when bad things happen. I also found Kippy's treatment of Dolores to be all too real; plenty of people would rather die than be friends with a fat person.

What I did not like is that Lamb clearly has no idea of what 257 pounds looks like. I know there were fewer fat people in the 70s, but my mother grew up during that time, and she said that there were plenty of people Dolores' size walking around, and they weren't gawked at. Keep in mind that Dolores wasn't 257 pounds at age 13, but as she was nearing adulthood. I've been close to that weight before, and I didn't have cars groaning under my weight, either. I'd be breathing heavily after going up stairs, yes, but not after walking for a short time.

I sometimes found it hard to sympathize with Dolores; some of the things she said to her mother were outright nasty. This isn't a criticism, though, as Dolores is also very human. Many of us fought with our parents, and I've said plenty of mean things to my own mother, especially in my late teens and early twenties. It was also hard for me to understand why she kept lying to people. Why was she afraid to tell Kippy about her real parents? Why did she create an entirely fictional life for herself while she was living with her husband? Of course, I knew her reasons, but as someone who finds it very unpleasant to lie (and comes clean almost immediately), it was hard for me to relate. But again, that's what makes Dolores such a great character.

I was glad to see Lamb address abuse as something more than physical, and as something that can be "hidden." Both Dolores' rapist and her husband are considered to be nice, pleasant men, completely unlike the men they become when they're alone with her. Dolores, too, is not above engaging in abusive behavior, such as when she holds onto Dante's naked pictures, which were never meant for her eyes to begin with.

The book flowed well, as Lamb's novels tend to do, and I was drawn in from the beginning. With a lot of books, I get bored during some scenes. That didn't happen with "She's Come Undone."

One final things I would say to authors--especially thin ones--seeking to write about fat people is, please stop comparing us to whales. It's so overdone. It was probably done as skilfully as possible in this case, but I was still rolling my eyes at all the parallels between Dolores and the "suicidal" humpbacks. Same with elephants and hippopotamuses. Fat people are human, and there's more to us than our sizes. And I get Google wasn't a thing when this book was published, but now it is. Look up what people of a certain weight look like. I can't even tell you how many books I've read that portrayed 200-250 lbs. inaccurately.

The experience of reading this book is roughly analogous to being slowly and painfully impaled with a stake, just without the blessed oblivion of death at the end. But I wouldn’t really know—I’ve never been impaled. It’s entirely possible this book is more painful than that.

Wally Lamb does an excellent job of writing from the perspective of a woman... I guess, I'm a woman, and I don't work that way. Everything I have ever read from Lamb has been wonderfully written with a good storyline that I could connect to, but I hated She's Come Undone.

The slothfulness and blaming done in this was ridiculous; I hated the characters. I wanted to yell at these people to get their acts together. I suppose this was the point; the book was well written and the characters had depth. This may be why it is easy to be mad at them for screwing up. I know this, but I still hated it.

i honestly couldn't tell you what i thought about this book. i'm not crazy about it, i'll tell you that much. i didn't know whether to hate Dolores or feel sorry for her. Like at times, I WANTED to feel sorry for her and sympathize for her but then she was a pretty nasty girl the way she treated some people and everything and the things that she did. I don't think because you have a hard life is really an excuse to be a bitch. I don't know. I thought it was going to be better the way people raved on about it but it wasn't anything special for me.

La historia de Dolores es triste y desgarradora, pero la vida también tiene sus momentos buenos.
A través de las quinientas y pico de páginas que componen este libro, descubrimos a una protagonista que a cada párrafo se torna aún más real, que nos muestra de forma descarnada cómo la vida la ha golpeado una y otra vez, y cómo, a pesar de ello, con momentos buenos y malos, siguió adelante.
Dolores, y todos los personajes que la rodean, nos muestran que la vida es un camino repleto de curvas, de baches y de emboscadas, y que solo siguiendo adelante es como se puede vivir.
Tocando fondo puede considerarse una novela netamente dramática, pero en el fondo busca enseñarnos mucho sobre la vida, y mostrándonos justamente cómo es la vida de una niña que se ve obligada a enfrentar a sus peores pesadillas. Muy recomendable.

I want to start out by saying that I read *I know this much is true* by Wally Lamb and would rate it in my top 5 favorite books of all time, so this review shouldn't deter anyone from reading his work.
I read some of the other reviews before writing this and I was surprised at how many women were shocked that a man could write such a convincing woman's perspective.
I know MANY insightful, perceptive men who understand women, so I don't find it a stretch that a man can write with a woman's voice. This is creative fiction after all.

If you were to take all the cliches' present in a difficult upbringing--physical and sexual abuse, sexual experimentation, growing up the fat kid, making continuous bad choices, demonizing men, dealing with someone with HIV, and then write a book with polarized characters who rarely find a common ground, you would end up with this book.

I take issue mostly with the character of Dante and his relationship with Dolores.
After a very traumatic upbringing, Dolores finally ends up in college. While there, she develops a very involved secret crush on a roommates’ boyfriend. Years later she runs across a picture of him, tracks down where he lives (without the internet), moves across the country and into his building (the flat directly across the hall, no less) and gets him to fall in love with and marry her in very short order. WHAT? She’s been a withdrawn, traumatized fat girl for the majority of her life but as soon as she loses weight and meets Dante, she develops these mad boyfriend-acquiring skills that turn him from lothario to devoted partner and husband. Please.
I can see randomly running across a picture of someone you recognize from your past, but everything after that was completely unbelievable.

Dante seemed merely a pawn, convenient to the author for whatever drama he wanted to introduce to Dolores, but there was no consistency in him throughout the book.
As a youth he's a loving and devoted Christian, when Dolores meets him he's a womanizing playboy but becomes an attentive thoughtful, boyfriend, then he turns into a critical and selfish spouse, then a cheat, then a virtual pedophile.

The next thing that made me go hmmm was that he took what was initially a positive gay relationship and threw in *the AIDS thing* to muck it all up. It was almost as if he said to himself *Okay. Now my characters are moving into the early 1980's. What was the drama happening then?* and chose AIDS.

Assuming that the gay characters were monogamous (which he surely alluded to) the only way they could have been exposed was through a breakup, so he randomly threw one in.
I don’t know many gay 50yo’s that break up mostly happy LTR’s in the hopes of finding better, especially in a small town and time where gay is still considered deviant.
I live in SF. I have scores of gay friends. I guess with my life experience, I just don't see the monogamous mid-life gay couple as the ones getting HIV.

The good things I WILL say about this book is that his writing is always amazingly descriptive, his characters have depth and texture (if not believability) and his stories are epic.

I will surely read more from him, but with a more critical eye now that he's fallen off the first impression pedestal I've put him on.
This was his first book, too, so I give him leeway for that.

Seriously, one of the best books I ever read. I fell in love from page one. When I made the transition to Kindle, I cleared out my bookshelves, keeping only the books I plan to read again and again. This is one.

This dark coming-of-age story was just an ok read for me. It felt long, a bit overdone and had very few happy moments along the way.

It all begins in the late 1950's with Delores, a lying, foul-mouthed young girl who enters her teens friendless and grossly overweight. Her lack of proper parental guidance and naivety leads to her troubled existence resulting in a disturbed young woman who struggles and searches for sex, love and acceptance in all the wrong places.

I loved Lamb's I Know This Much Is True, but "She's Come Undone" fell short of my expectations.