She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Dolores Price is heartbroken when her handsome, but immature, father leaves their suburban home for another woman. She and her mother move into her uptight grandmother’s apartment in Easterly, where she finds herself an outsider in the adolescent social hierarchy and the strict Catholic school she attends. After being raped by a charming neighbor, Jack Speight, she turns to food and television for comfort. By the age of 17 she has eaten her way to clinical obesity.
Following the accidental death of her mother, she decides to attend college in Pennsylvania. There she is ridiculed for her weight, and cultivates a secret obsession with her peppy roommate’s long-distance boyfriend, Dante, who sends love-letters and nude photos in the mail. After an ill-conceived one-night stand with her university’s lesbian janitor she takes a long cab ride to Cape Cod where she witnesses a beached whale dying. She feels kinship with the animal and wades into the water to drown herself.
After her suicide attempt she is institutionalized for several years, but begins to work through her issues with the help of her therapist. She loses over one-hundred pounds but becomes frustrated with the slow-moving therapy. She decides to move to Vermont, where she has located Dante, the object of her college obsession.
Dolores gets a job at a local grocery store, and moves into an apartment right across the hall from Dante. He is working as a high school English teacher but is frustrated with the stagnation in his life, after having given up his youthful goal to become a priest. They begin a relationship, and even get married. However Dante continues to dominate Dolores. He spends her savings on a new van, and pressures her into getting an abortion. After the loss of her baby she becomes resentful. After her grandmother dies, she eventually admits that she orchestrated their entire relationship, after becoming infatuated with him through his photos. She then leaves and moves into her late grandmother’s house, which she inherited.
At her grandmother’s funeral, Dolores is able to reconnect with several friends from her past, who form a surrogate family for her in Providence. They encourage her to pursue her dreams, and she enrolls in some college courses. Here she meets Thayer, a single father, who is immediately smitten with her, despite her troubled past. Initially she rebuffs his advances, but they begin a tentative romance, predicated on Dolores’s desire to have a child. Thayer even supports her as they receive IVF treatment, but they do not have enough money for a second attempt after the first one fails. Dolores reluctantly resigns herself to the fact that she may never be a mother, yet still finds peace.
She’s Come Undone is primarily about self-discovery and acceptance. Wally Lamb was heralded as a genius for his ability to write from the perspective of a woman.
