Holly's Book 1: She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb's debut novel, She's Come Undone, is something I've been meaning to read for ages. It's been on my "To Read" list for years, a book mentioned in passing by older family and friends and referenced on occasion in my Contemporary American Women's Fiction class last semester. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't read it sooner, because it's been sitting on my shelf for years. Maybe I was intimidated by its size (465 pages - that's kind of big, right...?) or its cover (a woman's head floating bizarrely in a cloudy sky above a bright blue ocean), but whatever it was, I'm glad I finally got over my fears. She's Come Undone is an easy read, and pretty darn good in a book-clubby way.

The novel begins with Dolores Price as a child, smart-alecky and sure of herself, dealing with the effects of her parents' marital problems. From there, it follows her journey through failed relationships, trauma, death, and ultimately, mental and physical recovery from the harm inflicted upon her by others and by herself. With Dolores, it seems that growth is a one-step-forward, two-steps-back sort of deal - and at times, reading about her extended recovery annoyed me. Looking back, though, I have to appreciate it. That's the way life is and the way people are: damaged, damaging, growing and ungrowing and growing again. And Dolores is quirky and entertaining throughout, even (sometimes especially) at her most apathetic.

While Dolores is a character entertaining enough to sustain the novel by herself, I loved most of the characters she develops relationships with, all of whom affect her in one way or another. The cast of secondary characters ranges from the obvious (mother, father, grandmother) to the more obscure (high school guidance counselor, wall paper hanger, even a beached whale). Again, true to life, some of these characters stick around and understand their impact, while some merely pass through Dolores's life. All are well-developed and interesting in their own right, but they became more interesting as the story progressed and I saw more and more clearly how they fit like puzzle pieces into Dolores's journey. In this novel, Wally Lamb manages to time everything perfectly without making anything seem contrived.

One of the things that most amazed me about this novel was the author's gender. Maybe this seems unenlightened of me, but for the first hundred pages or so I had to keep checking the author's photo for proof of his masculinity - and every time, there was Mr. Lamb staring back at me. I know that men can write female characters and women can write male characters, etc etc. But there's something almost unsettling and almost amazing about the extent to which Lamb accesses a female voice/perspective/experience, writing this character's growth and development over 30-plus years from childhood into adulthood. In Dolores, I recognized myself and the women around me; more than that, though, I caught glimpses of things I'd forgotten from childhood and things from adulthood that I have yet to deal with. How is it that Lamb knows things about being a woman that I didn't know until I read them in his book? How ever Lamb does it, Dolores rings true from the first page to the last.

A lot of crap happens to Dolores in She's Come Undone - and at times, Dolores herself does "come undone." Even though the novel chronicles her journey well into adulthood, I think it could accurately be categorized as a coming-oh-age story. It takes time for Dolores to deal fully with the trauma she experiences as a young girl, and that, in essence, is what this book is about: a woman learning, finally, to be okay with who she is and who she has been.