Wally Lamb Gives Voice to a Favourite Heroine
It's getting to the season where some folks are looking for a good beach read. She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb lacks the lightness of a summer read, but it’s still easy to get lost in the saga-like plot and colourful cast of characters.
Its jacket describes the book as a “coming-of-age odyssey,” and I’d say that’s pretty accurate. The story begins in 1956 as four-year-old Dolores Price and her mother await delivery of a new television set. The set is a gift from her father’s rich and overly-attentive female employer, and the reader quickly gets a sense that all is not well in Dolores’s world.
Her father’s multiple infidelities, together with the loss of a baby in childbirth, lead to divorce and her mother’s severe depression, for which she is institutionalized. Dolores goes to live with her grandmother: a woman she hates, where she encounters various school bullies and a strange collection of neighbours. At thirteen, with her mother now out of the hospital and living in the grandmother’s home, Dolores is raped by a charismatic married tenant. She slides into years of compulsive eating, TV-watching, and ongoing conflicts with her mother. Then, her mother is killed in a workplace accident and Dolores reluctantly decides to honour her mother’s wish that she go to college.
The college experience is unhappy (Dolores is bullied by many because of her weight and experiences unwelcome interest by a college staffer). Eventually she snaps, killing the staffer’s pet fish and escaping to Cape Cod to see a TV-featured dying whale before being institutionalized for seven years. With the help of a forward-thinking psychiatrist, Dolores gradually confronts her traumas, including her mother’s affair with the man who raped her. She moves to a half-way house, then productive employment, where she stumbles upon the location of her college roommate’s neglected boyfriend and decides to move to his community. A relationship ensues, and all seems initially rosy, but they disagree about having a child. Dolores reluctantly has an abortion and they marry, but after four years and an infidelity on his part the marriage ends.
About the same time, her grandmother dies, and Dolores ends up back in the house she’d longed to escape. She stays put, getting several jobs, but regresses in the midst of this stressful transition: belligerent behaviour at work, seclusion, and overeating. Her grandmother’s eccentric—now disabled—neighbour, Roberta, re-enters the picture and helps refocus Dolores, as does her former high school counsellor, Mr. Pucci: a gay man who has lost his long-time partner to AIDS and is infected as well. Dolores re-connects with an employer who sees her potential and offers to fund some college classes. There she meets and ultimately marries a fellow student and single father; they’d both like to have a child, but by the end of the book they’re still trying. As the story closes her husband takes her on another trip to Cape Cod. This time she is able to celebrate the sighting of a live whale breaking through the waves.
Apologies for the long synopsis, but it’s a meaty book. Reading it again, I felt like I’d been put through the emotional ringer; yet it was worth it, as always. Because amidst this odyssey of hurdles and heartbreak, there is also a strong sense of hope and the possibility of transformation. As well, along the way, Dolores finds multiple allies who soften life’s blows and expand her world.
Of the many books I’ve read, this stays on my bookshelf for several reasons. It's not another idealized depiction of life in the 1950s, with an intact flourishing nuclear family. That was new to me. In addition, when originally published, much was made about the author’s ability to write convincingly as a young female in the first person. While this is a lesser element in my overall assessment, it is still noteworthy.
The book also does a good job of illustrating how early trauma, particularly when not expressed or dealt with, can strongly influence the trajectory of our lives: our choices, what we feel we deserve, our triggers, and many other aspects. As research shows, the more trauma or adverse life events experienced when young, the more profound the negative impacts on physical, mental, and social health as life unfolds. Given Dolores’s early and multiple adversities, the reader has some context for understanding her subsequent behaviours. She is frustrating and unsympathetic at times—often her own worst enemy—yet I continued to root for Dolores Price throughout. And, she is just one of many multi-dimensional characters in the book: flawed yet endearing, and that rang very true to me.
I’ve always been drawn to stories of the underdog, and those who persevere through adversity to find their place and purpose in the world. Wally Lamb has created such a story, where life can be hard, people can be imperfect, and there can still be a way forward amidst that messiness.
