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 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 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 25 years ago and I think the statute of limitations has really run on this one. Rosebud was his sled!!

Upon finishing this book I felt compelled to sit perfectly still, in the warm glow of the words of the story, to think about the life of Delores Price. What a fantastic story indeed. I quickly became emotionally entangled with Delores from the very beginning – I rooted for her, I yelled at her, I advised her, I wept for her, I pushed her, I implored her, I cheered for her and I crashed with her under the weight of disappointment, injustice and delusion time after time after time.

The writing is rich and descriptive but not overbearing and the story line is crystal clear. No sharp twists to worry about. I think the very deep hook into this tale for me was the story timeline that began in the 1950s – I was born in ’57, grew up during the 60’s revolution, endured the brutal economic recession and gas rationing of the 70s, disco vs rock 80s and great stock market crash of 1987. I completely understood the nuances of all the presidential, political and social references during the book. They made it feel truly real for me.

Many reviewers panned this book, exclaiming that a male author could not possibly capture the true perspective and essence of an adolescent girl coming of age, maturing into a middle aged women, enduring parental divorce and infidelity, rape, harassment and bullying, her own painful marriage and divorce, death of very close loved ones and in the end finding true happiness in life in her own way. That may be true. I cannot say. But for me the book was a huge winner because my heart completely overflowed with intense empathy for Delores Price. Empathy is gender neutral. If an author can make me feel such intense empathy and compassion for a character, that author did an outstanding job regardless of their gender! This is a 5-STAR effort in my view.

So my first foray into the work of Wally Lamb was a huge success. Next up is I Know This Much Is True that I am reading with a Goodreads friend – can’t wait to dig in!

Keep reading and sharing – and support your local library!

Amazing, sad, weird, fascinating story. Enjoyed it, sort of John Irving style.

"She's Come Undone" is the story of a troubled woman's journey through a difficult life. Dolores Price felt that she was caught in the middle of her parents' abusive marriage. Her father was a womanizer and her mother was emotionally fragile. After their divorce, Dolores moved to her grandmother's home in Rhode Island where she was friendless at her new school. Dolores went through some heartbreaking times, and comforted herself with overeating junk food. She had to deal with trauma, obesity, low self-esteem, guilt, and grief through her teens. Dolores had a wicked sense of humor, but she often turned hurtful and foul-mouthed. After years of therapy, life was not perfect, but she was able to cope better when life knocked her down again. Dolores met some interesting, unusual people who interacted with her, and some of the best parts of the book involved Dolores helping someone who was going through a bad time.

Wally Lamb wrote the character of a traumatized, depressed girl very well. The Connecticut author set the book in New England at the time he was growing up, so its sense of time and place rang true. However, a few of the situations seemed a little over the top. 3.5 stars.

Thanks to Oprah's endorsement, this book has been on my TBR list and my book shelf for years. Glad I finally got a chance to read it. Dolores Price lives a life full of changes: starting from eight years old, she deals with one traumatic experience after another, from her parent's break up, to her mother's break down, a life with a grouchy grandma, neighborhood kids who tease her, and schoolmates who pretend she's invisible. She leads a sad existence, but responds to it with snarky comebacks and scarfing down junk food to hide the pain. Her life continues to spiral out of control as she grows into an adult, taking the reader on one of the wackiest rides I've ever been privy to.

This book reminds me of the movie Forrest Gump because as Dolores grows and deals with her own issues, the reader is also thrust into the signs of the times. Events like Woodstock and the burgeoning AIDs epidemic become major themes and color the story. Also, Dolores is sort of handicapped due to her constant battle with trauma and mental illness. Her decisions are extremely outrageous for most of the book. I probably said, "Girl, what?!" 82 times while reading it.

The first half of the book was not as interesting as I thought it would be. I'd attribute it to most of the characters being extremely unlikeable. Character personalities aside, Wally Lamb is a great, detailed storyteller who kept me engaged, thankfully, because the final quarter of the book was really good and made me happy that I kept pushing through. My opinion on this book is still somewhat up in the air, so I think 3 stars will do.

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

Update: I found an old review I wrote about this book for an online book club I used to be in. I clearly hated it. Here it is, more or less in its entirety.


To be blunt, I didn't like it. It's hard to know where to begin when explaining my dislike for 'She's Come Undone.' Wally Lamb, to be sure, wrote very...believably. I felt like it was a girl writing. However, the fact of the matter is that I'm a man, and I have no idea how a woman thinks. Therefore, I'm clearly not the best judge of this.

My first problem was the paper-thin development of male characters in the story. Perhaps I'm being picky, but I thought all the male characters. In the best cases they had no depth. In the worst cases their actions didn't even make sense.

Let's first explore the "Daddy" character. He is a stock deadbeat dad. Not all that attentive or a good parent when he was around, and then he disappears. And when he does so, we are left to fill in the blanks with vague details of his life. He is remarried. He is divorced again. He is remarried again. He doesn't write. He makes empty promises. Blah blah blah. We can understand why Dolores is so angry with him, but we are given only a cursory glimpse to his emotions, what drives him. Towards the end of the novel his wife writes Dolores and tells her that he was "a good man." And it leaves Dolores to wonder, 'was he a good man?' This was a good device, because we are left to wonder as Dolores did. However, the fact remains that we were given very little of the character. He was a tool, a means to make Dolores what she grew into (quite literally). But "Daddy" is probably one of the better male characters. (A side note, and to answer Megan's question, I think it was a blatant device used by Lamb in having Dolores refer to her deadbeat father as "daddy" constantly. He was clearly, in my mind anyway, attempting to connect Dolores's father's leaving as the end of Dolores's innocence, the end of her childhood, as shortly after she was violated by Jack. And maybe that is truly how such a thing would happen. But, as useful a device as that may have been, I find it trite, because I cannot bring myself to believe that a young woman with so much hate towards her father that she would cuss him out at her mother's funeral and cut off all contact with him for her entire life would continue to refer to him as "daddy" throughout the course of her tormented life. But that's just my opinion.)

Thayer. A stock nice guy meant to contrast Jack and Dante. Beyond that, he really serves no purpose aside from offering Dolores a type of redemption.

Jack and Dante. Now, I feel that they were basically the same character. Which was appropriate, because they both did complete 180's in their personality. Someone in an earlier post mentioned that there were "clues" as to their true nature. With Jack, I disagree. It was complete bullshit.

First of all, all we were given of Jack was how wonderful he was. In fact, at the end the chapter in which we are introduced to Jack and his generically cute wife Dolores says the whole family fell in love with a couple. Which is true in a sense, in that Jack won the family over. But what of his wife? No one seemed to like her. Dolores's mother was fucking Jack, so clearly she didn't love his wife. And Dolores complains that his wife isn't good enough for Jack, that she is not pretty enough or some such nonsense. No, no, it was Jack they fell in love with. And initially you can see why. He is handsome and fun, very likable. But then he is completely different, and we are given no good reason why. He starts out like an all-American neighbor who suddenly devolves into a degenerate because, why, because he is giving Dolores rides home after school? Because his wife wanted to get pregnant? It didn't make sense. There were no hints at all until he started giving Dolores rides home after school and swearing and acting like a generally rude asshole. And to me that felt contrived, as if Lamb was saying, "see, it shouldn't be surprising that he is raping her. He swore and yelled at her in the car a few times! He's not the guy we all thought he was!"

But that's just it! Lamb sets Jack up as this great guy and then artificially tears him down. Jack didn't even feel like the caricature he was purported to be. It was like two different people, and the only common thread was that Dolores had a crush on him and he was called Jack.

Let us just take a moment to review Dante. We are clearly meant to draw parallels from Jack to Dante. Both were introduced to us as good men. Then they were arbitrarily turned into child molesters when the situation fit (i.e. when it would ruin Dolores's life). To be honest, the only thing that even hinted at what Dante would become when he was religious and vulnerable is the letter where he says he does not want to become a womanizer. But, in brief, he is a religious, vulnerable virgin as a young man and a verbally (and on one occasion, physically) abusive, arrogant, sex-obsessed adult.

And he decides that Dolores is the one from the get-go. Why? Mr. Wing (the landlord) mentions that he is quite the womanizer. The teacher at the dance alludes to the exotic women he used to date. He clearly gets off on young girls (as we see at the dance and his relationship with Sheila). But Dolores steps into his life, he beds her immediately and then, just as quickly gives up on all other women. Moves in with Dolores and eventually marries her. I realise that there are arguments for why this could happen (she's easy to live with as she just considers herself lucky to have him; but I find that bullshit because he clearly isn't intellectually stimulated by her, and I doubt he is intellectually stimulated by hot high school girls), in short, I'm not really buying them. They are not logical in life or the story. So, essentially, Dante is simply there to be the adult Jack--physically and emotionally raping Dolores until she is able to defend herself and leave. But he is not believable.

And finally, Dolores. I have so many questions. She gets fat and depressed for good reasons. Fine, all very well. I sympathize. College breaks her and she goes nuts, has a brief lesbian encounter (but, come on, what young girl doesn't experiment with that sort of thing in college? Am I right ladies?) and freaks out about it and, generally, her life. So she runs away, swims with a beached whale, goes crazy and ends up in a mental institute. And boy, does she go crazy. Biting her tongue til it bleeds? Mutalating herself in various ways? Why? I read that sort of thing and I was fucking shocked. I mean, she was depressed, sure, but why did she start mutalating herself? Because she was in a mental hospital? I don't buy it at all. I feel like it was simply stereotypical bullshit thrown out by Lamb for shock value, as if to say to the reader, "look....look what her life has done to her!" Ridiculous. In fact, I found the entire mental hospital to be a load of bullshit, from the "therapy" she alternately accepts and rejects (which she should have just outright rejected, because, maverick or no maverick, Dr. Shaw belonged in that hospital as a patient, not a doctor. That scene where he is talking to Dolores in the "womb" (pool) was just creepy. It made me uncomfortable.) to the way she leaves. Completely contrived. Why did she leave? Everything was going well, so she started "etch-a-sketching" (a clear connection to her mother and her painting, specifically the flying leg painting. Both are left of what you would expect, even in creative outlets) and then decided to abruptly abandon the therapy before completion due to some psychic. That was completely out of character, at least out of the character Lamb had fleshed out for us in the mental hospital. She was just starting to come around and be a functioning human being again, and she suddenly throws it all away because of some psychic? It didn't make sense, felt contrived, a plot device to keep the story moving and avoid it getting bogged down in the mental hospital.

So I feel like this is getting a little long, so I will skip ahead to what I consider the third part of Dolores's life, when she leaves Dante and moves back into her Grandmother's house. And I will skip most of that, because it was dull and uneventful (she puts her life back together, grand) and go to the part that stuck out for me the most. That was the contrived fight she has with Rita, where Rita falls down the stairs and ends up in the hospital. What the fuck was that all about? I mean, seriously, where did that come from? Everything is going great. Rita tells Dolores she should buy a car with her money, Dolores is leaning towards a satellite and big television. So she gets it. Fair enough? Apparently not. Apparently Lamb is angry that not enough people read these days (rightfully so, I would say, but that is beside the point) and continued his quest to make television out to be one of the main villains in Dolores life, by having the television lead her into another depression (which he lazily tries to attribute to sudden recurrent sad feelings about Dante, but it doesn't fly. We are basically left to assume that the TV just plain makes her lazy. Period.). And so Rita comes over and, apparently, yells that Dolores should have bought a car instead of a big TV, which leads Dolores to freak out and scream at her and Rita falls, and Dolores gets more depressed and starts walking around in 3-D glasses all the time. I mean, are you serious? Did I miss something? Just bullshit. Plain and simple. It's as if Lamb felt there wasn't enough heartache, that things were going too well and he didn't want to end the story just yet. (Which also explains the return of Mr. Pucci, because, after all, what story set in the mid 80's is complete without a personal reference to the AIDS epidemic?).

In summation, I felt the book was trite and contrived.

This caused more controversy than any book my book group read. Half the group loved it, half hated it. I thought it could have easily been 100 pages shorter while telling the same story, and the only character I liked was the bad guy. Also, the symbolism was like getting smacked in the head with a Louisville Slugger.

The HR director where I used to work saw me leaving my copy at the company lending library.

"Didn't you LOVE that book?" she swooned.

"Well, some of my friends did, but to be honest, I didn't like it at all," I said.

She responded in a mild and pleasant tone of voice: "Well, I guess you've never been a fat girl, have you?"

She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb

She's Come Undone is the 1992 debut novel by Wally Lamb. She's Come Undone has been translated into eighteen languages.

She's Come Undone is the story of a troubled teenage girl growing into a woman, her struggles and the ways in which she decides to cope with them. In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40.

Wally Lamb has written his first novel in the arresting voice of Dolores Price, a 40-year-old woman who recounts in scrupulous detail her harrowing progress into adulthood.

In "She's Come Undone," an ambitious, often stirring and hilarious book, Mr. Lamb gives his vociferous heroine truly heroic proportions, in both the physical and the psychical sense.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز نخست ماه اکتبر سال 2008میلادی

عنوان: دو ل‍ورس‌؛ نویسنده: وال‍ی‌ ل‍م‍ب‌‏‫؛ مترجم: ن‍وش‍ی‍ن‌ ری‍ش‍ه‍ری‌؛ تهران، نقش و نگار، 1384؛ در 336ص؛ شابک 9646235921؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

رمان «دولورس؛ دختر ناموفق»، نوشته «والی لمب» نویسنده ی «آمریكایی» است؛ «دولورس» شخصیت محوری این رمان از مشکلات خانوادگی بسیاری رنج میبرد ولی تلاش خستگی ناپذیری را برای رهایی از این مشکلات و آفرینش یک زندگی دیگر را برای خود آغاز میکند و...؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 09/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

When I read this book, I felt like the author took his (surprisingly the author is a man for such a female story) hand, clawed through my ribcage and tore my heart out. This is one of the few books that makes me cry. I may feel sorrow when I read an angsty book, but normally I don't cry. Well this one turned on the waterworks for me.

Dolores had a crappy life. Her father who she loved walks out on Dolores and her mother. Mom has to work for the first time in her life and Dolores becomes a latchkey kid. She took solace in eating after she was horribly raped by a neighbor. She ate until she got really big. She ate to fill the hole inside of herself and to take away the pain. It didn't work. It wasn't so bad until her mother died, and it really went downhill.

So she spends the majority of this book as an outcast in the world. I thought Lamb did a great job of showing how the obese feel and are treated. As if they are monstrosities not worthy of human kindness. Even when you are plump, you are often treated unkindly, but being obese is like having a sign on you that says, "I know you think I'm disgusting, so kick me."

Even a person who should understand her pain and what she faces as an obese person, really turns out to be a user, and that part was very hard to read.

Dolores ends up attempting suicide and ends up in a mental institution, getting her mind together and losing weight. When she gets out, she is pleasingly plump. She has a decent job and is faring well. She cannot believe that she is actually getting attention from men. I wish she waited for the right one. Unfortunately she doesn't. That's when she meets the worst piece of garbage on earth, becomes involved with him, and eventually marries him. It's like he picks up on her low self esteem and zeroes in on her. And this relationship takes another very large piece of her heart away in ways that I cannot go into without spoiling the book.

This is one of those journeys where you feel like the end is a cliff overlooking sharp, jagged rocks. Thankfully it's not. If you can continue along on Dolores' heartbreaking voyage of discovery, there is a place of hope at the end. Life won't be a perfect fairy tale ending, but we all know that life isn't like that. But her perseverance and the strength inside her gentle soul allows her to make it to a place of self-discovery and peace, where contentment and joy can enter into her life at the end of this heartbreaking novel.

I read this book the first time, and I listened to it on tape the second time, and both times left me sobbing. Imagine driving your car and crying at the same time. I can't say it's for everyone, but I have no regrets in reading this book. It is one of the few Oprah books that I read and did enjoy, tears and all.

Loved this even more the 2nd time. My full review will be up on my booktube channel at http://Youtube.com/peterlikesbooks

I loved this book as a teenager but haven’t read it in like fifteen years so it’s probably actually pretty bad and offensive but like, 17 year old me thought it slapped (that was not a term at the time).