▲ Pictured is Dolores Price, whom She’s Come Undone is centered around. Provided by chubbymadness.com.

Dolores has an extreme case of the blues. It seems to extend throughout her entire youth. Indeed, Dolores is really living up to her name, which means “sorrows” in Spanish. Although she would love to blame her own size for her sorrows, somehow anyone can tell her life was not led amiss solely by her plus-sized physique. But watching Dolores who seems to have lost her self-control and self-esteem, struggle into adulthood, readers will find bits of themselves in her. Because in the end who does not have a crazy, damaged, and out-of-control side?

 
“Wally Lamb informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the ‘simple’ act of living a human life,” said a reviewer of She’s Come Undone (1992) in The Tennessean. Truly, with this book, readers will follow the life of Dolores Price, a 40 year-old-woman. Her life is generous with hardships and tests, and very much resembles the lives of so many people today.
 
She’s Come Undone, Lamb’s first novel, was a number one The New York Times bestseller, chosen as a The New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was featured by Oprah's Book Club. Lamb was in the ninth year of his 25-year career as a high school English teacher when he began to write fiction in 1981. Lamb has said of this fiction that through his books, he can move beyond the boundaries and limitations of his own experiences and better understand others.
 
She’s Come Undone opens with the 40-year-old Dolores Price’s voice telling a story from her childhood. More specifically, it is one about when she was just fouryears-old. It is 1956, when televisions were rarely a household item; yet, the Price family welcomes into their humble abode a television given as a present by her father Tony’s boss, Mrs. Masicotte. The television, appearing to be no more than fascinating and harmless, is a harbinger of the troubles to come such as the Price family’s eventual dissolution, her mother’s dismantling, and Dolores’s traumatic advancement into young adulthood.
 
One of the biggest aspects that made She’s Come Undone, and its heroine so endearing to its readers was that even at her worst moments, Dolores was tangibly human, flawed, and lovable. A scene that demonstrates how human Dolores is, would be when as a little child, Dolores learns her first lesson in “the awful strength of coveting, the power of want.” When little Dolores fails to even grab a fat dog named Zahra’s attention, readers cannot help but sympathize and panic with her.
 
She’s Come Undone is one of those rare books where the conclusion is of minor significance. The fact that 40 year old Dolores was triumphant is not so much as important as how she came to be that way. The true gem of this book is in the how. At the last page of the book, Dolores says, “Whatever prices I’ve paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too.” Her words could not be truer. For those that feel they have lost control of who they are, and those that are afraid of losing control in the chaotic everyday life, She’s Come Undone is a book they should not miss out on reading.
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