What a depressing read... I read this many years ago and think it was one if the worst books I've ever read!!!

OMG! I was so disappointed in this book. It was not what I thought it was gonna be. I HATED the character until the last couple of chapters. I know this book got lots of great ratings and reviews, and I'm probably gonna be viewed as an idiot, but we just did not mix. It was like water and oil, two magnets repelling each other.


I thought I was going to pretty much love this book. I've dealt with weight issues all of my life, so I figured I could really relate to the character. I don't know, I should have probably felt more sympathy for the character. But I just couldn't. This took me damn near a week to read. At times I would clean the house to avoid reading it. Now, that is not a good thing, LOL. It should be that I put off cleaning until I get to a part of the book where I can lay it down. That's how it usually works...


The main character Dolores just simply pissed me off. She is a spoiled rotten brat. Then an angry, bitchy, cruel teen. Then, a fucked up adult. At times I wanted to put my foot up her ass and wear her as a snowshoe. She is either blaming herself for everything or blaming everybody else. I saw a lot of similarities between her and I, less then perfect childhood, abused, bullied. One would have thought it would have made me more sympathetic to her plight. Nope, wasn't the case. I made plenty of stupid choices in my life and regret the way I reacted to a lot of it. Wished I would have reacted a little more mature at times. Maybe that's why I didn't like her. She didn't rise above, she let herself get pulled down and almost drowned.


And I hated the end. LOL

It was just too abrupt. It ended and I was like "what?" "That's it?" and then "Dumb..."


That's just my opinion. I'm sure for many others this book is fabulous. There is nothing wrong with the way it was written. It flowed along seamlessly. The characters weren't missing anything. It's just me...LOL

What surprised me about this novel was the strength of the voice of Dolores. She was so real. At times I would forget I was reading and when I would come to the end of a chapter it would almost startle me to look back up at my own living room. It was more like Dolores was right there in the flesh telling me her story. (She looks like Ricki Lake in my head.) There were times when I wanted to hug her, times when I wanted to roll my eyes and tell her to stop being a Drama Queen, and times when I wanted to tell her grow up and do the big girl thing. But of course I couldn't. She is fictional. She is isn't she?

What I didn't like was that the story rambled on without any apparent structure. I suppose if Dolores were really in my living room telling me her story this is how it would be...but it's a novel and I wanted more structure from it. The whole whale thing I thought was silly and didn't work for me.

Overall, Dolores and her story were so real to me that I enjoyed this one much more than I thought I would. It was fun to watch Dolores grow as a person. She finds herself and in the process of doing so learns to see others as fragile humans too. We all suffer. We all love. This is what makes us human and this is what make Dolores human too.

I should have a bookshelf called "depressing." This is an Oprah pick, so I more or less knew what to expect. It was pretty much a long train wreck of a life, with lots of depressing moments, although somewhat positive in the end.

It was actually interesting reading this after Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, because some of her experiences were similar. A traumatized childhood followed by years of physical and emotional self-abuse, a series of broken relationships, etc. It partly made me feel sorry for her, and partly wanting to shake her and tell her to grow up a little bit, but feeling guilty for feeling that way because of the trauma and personal guilt she was carrying around. I spent the last 200 pages just wanting the book to be over with already. It was ok but nothing I would recommend to anyone else.
2.5/5

Delores Price a young girl, who lives through so much tragedy and deals with it in such self-destructive ways that the story becomes depressing, tragic.
The book deals with harsh subjects: rape, abortion, divorce, parental instability, bullying. Delores herself is not the nicest of people. She is self-destructive, pushes away anyone who tries to love her, and constantly blames herself for life's atrocities.

This one's been around for many years, and I finally got around to reading it. It should almost be classified as a horror novel, but the monster is inside, not around the corner.

"She's Come Undone" is the story of a girl's downward spiral into obesity and insanity. Every time you think she's going to turn the corner and be "happy", things just fall apart. I hope some of my younger friends will read this and appreciate what may be going on inside the mind and heart of "that girl" who's such a mean bitch.

What a dark and deep journey.

This is the story of protagonist Dolores Price from age four to forty (from approximately 1952 to 1992). Dolores experiences one setback after another in her life – parental divorce, multiple deaths in the family, rape, an eating disorder, attempted suicide, mental health issues to the point of hospitalization, abortion, marital infidelity, infertility issues, friends dying of AIDS, etc. She enrolls in college to please her mother, but only finds more abuse and bullying. Afterward, she sets out to find her ex-roommate’s boyfriend, and initially succeeds, only to be met with more disillusionment. Her grandmother becomes her only touchpoint, but there is a distance between them that cannot be bridged.

I think the author does a good job of establishing Dolores as a sympathetic character; however, this is another “misery book” where so many bad things happen that I found it difficult to wade through it all. I kept hoping for some mitigation of the misery, but just when I thought something positive would happen, Dolores must go through more suffering. It is a character-driven story of survival despite trauma and tragedy. I am not a big fan of books that emphasize sorrow and suffering with very little hope or optimism. I wish I could get better at spotting these types of books so I could avoid them.

Sometimes I really think I'm 'out of sync' with some mainstay favorites and this is one of those times. This and the Road were both Ophrah picks and I did not like either one.

I would say this is the worst book I've ever read, but that wouldn't be true, (The aforementioned "The Road" has that honor) but as you can see from my rating it isn't much higher up th list.

If you like books about the people who never fit in, are kind of mean, are clinically depressed, have screwed up families, who are clueless about why their lives are as awful as they are, or truly enjoyed the Confederacy of Dunces...then this is the book for you.

The author took way way way (did I say way) too much time adding in tons of details, making the character's life more and more pathetic. This book could have been half as long as it was. And what is with the Whales? Other than a metephor for unhappy fat people which seems trite?

I'm not sure if I'm glad or annoyed that at least there was a happy ending to this tale. I did not feel that the character went through real growth, but instead just grew fed up. Maybe that's considered growth.

There were only two highlights for me in this book. When she finds him cheating and eating a hotdog and when she breaks up with him at Burger King. Other than that I felt that reading this book was just a waste of time.

I hated this book so much I set fire to it in my kitchen sink so that there would be one less copy of it in the world.

Kind of reminds me of The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty.

I feel like I've met that woman, who comes across like the result of a mating between Robert Mitchum and an Irish setter.

Wally Lamb's writing is, as usual, beautiful. I especially liked how well he wrote a first person account of a girl's experiences as she goes through her teenage and then womanhood.

What I was not thrilled about was that the pace slacked often enough that my attention to the plot was compromised during the read.

Dolores Price is a pretty unforgettable protagonist and narrator. Television addict, overeater, and Etch-a-Sketch artist extraordinaire, she’s a survivor of her parents’ divorce, a rape, and her mother’s untimely death. She succeeds in losing loads of weight, making it out of a mental hospital and snaring the husband she picked out from photographs years before. She finally has a home of her very own. But is she happy? Reminiscent of White Oleander and the best of John Irving, this is a sprawling, compulsively readable story about making your own life and finding happiness in the random course that it takes. I especially loved Mr. Pucci, Dolores’s teacher, and her neighbor Roberta, who gets the great lines “Life’s a shit sandwich, my ass. Life’s a polka and don’t you forget it!” I wasn’t as fond of the Jungian/mystical stuff about Dolores having to go back to the womb and becoming obsessed with whales (too easy a metaphor for obesity?) after a beaching at Cape Cod. All in all, though, I’ve never been let down by an Oprah’s Book Club selection yet. I’ll also read Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True.