She's Come Undone
Authors: Wally Lamb
PRAISE FOR WALLY LAMB'S
She's Come Undone
A
People
Magazine Top-Ten
Book of the Year
A
New York Times
Notable
Book of the Year
A
Los Angeles Times
Book Award Finalistâ
Best First Novel of the Year
“Mr. Lamb gives his vociferous heroine truly heroic proportions, in both the physical and the psychical sense. . . . John Updike once observed that J.D. Salinger loves some of his characters âmore than God loves them,' which might be said about Wally Lamb. . . . Those characters are equally endearing to the reader, as Dolores Price is, even in her most self-deprecatory moments: this reader kept rooting for her to overcome all adversity and find peace and happiness.”
âHilma Wolitzer,
The New York Times Book Review
“There's so much to love in it. . . . I adore
SHE'S COME UNDONE!”
âElinor Lipman, author of
The Way Men Act
and
Isabel's Bed
“In
SHE'S COME UNDONE,
Wally Lamb taps into the troubled inner world of his female protagonist with a degree of realism that would make such notable women writers as Marilyn French and Margaret Atwood proud.”
â
Village View
“At a time when most of us could use a little personal moment of triumph, spending some time with Dolores is great therapy.”
âDigby Diehl
“WARNING: Don't read the ending in public if you don't have two tissues handy. . . . It's a two-boxer.”
âThe Wichita Eagle
“. . . a warm-blooded, enveloping tale of survival. . . . Dolores has a killer mouth and the guts of a sea lion.”
â
Kirkus Reviews
“Dolores Price . . . [is] a character few readers will soon forget. . . .
SHE'S COME UNDONE
is a novel worth reading by a writer worth watching.”
â
Booklist
“Lamb has written a tour de force, a magnificent and beautiful first novel whose lyric voice and compelling story couple to make an astonishing debut.”
âBret Lott, author of
Jewel
“A fat, satisfying first novel.”
â
Entertainment Weekly
“Contemporary fiction just doesn't get much better than this. . . . It's the kind of book that makes you stop reading and shake your head, shocked by the insights you've encountered. In short, you'll be undone.”
â
Hartford Advocate
“An extraordinarily gifted author . . . a compulsively readable novel, full of heartbreak and savage humor, which dares to show us the ultimate fragility of love . . . a wonderful, inventive, ambitious, and, it cannot be stressed enough,
hilarious,
first novel.”
âKristin McCloy, author of
Velocity
“As you read
SHE'S COME UNDONE
your entire life will flash before your eyes. . . . It's a little bit like strolling down memory lane with Dick Clark on one arm, Jean-Paul Sartre on the other. It's scary, but Lord, it's wonderful!”
âCathie Pelletier, author of A
Marriage Made in Woodstock
“. . . Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he's that gifted. . . . This novel does what good fiction should doâit informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the âsimple' act of living a human life.”
â
The Nashville Tennessean
“A remarkable novel. . . . Like John Irving, Lamb assembles a riotous and colorful cast of characters. . . . Dolores and her entourage stumble through the tumult and heartbreak of life as it is really lived. Theirs is a journey worth joining.”
â
Bookpage
“This big, warm, embracing book . . . is all about the self and about rebirth, all about creating the family we wish to belong to and making peace with the one we were given. . . . Filled with a generous love and understanding of women . . . a healing vision of the way we must learn from, possess, and then undo the past in order to make a future.”
â
New Orleans Times-Picayune
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Portions of this novel, in somewhat different form, have been published as the short stories “Keep in a Cool, Dry Place” and “The Flying Leg” in
Northeast
magazine.
“Ole Devil Called Love.” Words and Music by D. Fisher & A. Roberts. Used by permission of Doris Fisher Music & Allan Roberts Music. Copyright renewed 1971.
“Respect.” Words and Music by Otis Redding. Copyright © 1963 by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
“See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet” reprinted with permission of General Motors Corporation, Chevrolet Motor Division.
“Tom Dooley.” Words and music collected, adapted, and arranged by Frank Warner, John A. Lomax, and Alan Lomax. From the singing of Frank Proffitt. TROâ© copyright 1947 (renewed) and 1958 (renewed) Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY. Used by Permission.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Stanley Kunitz for permission to reprint lines from his poem “The Wellfleet Whale,” copyright © 1985 by Stanley Kunitz.
Â
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE FOR USE OF THE FOLLOWING:
“The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran
“Love Is Like a Heat Wave” by Eddie Holland, Brian Holland, and Lamont Dozier
“It's My Party” by John Gluck, Wally Gold, Herbert Weiner, and Seymour Gottlieb
“Our Day Will Come” by Bob Hilliard and Mort Garson
“Chiquita Banana” by Leonard MacKenzie, Jr., William Wirges, and Garth Montgomery
“Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell
“Tonight's the Night (It's Gonna Be Alright)” by Rod Stewart
“Everyday People” by Sylvester Stewart
“Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be)” by Roger J. (Ram) Ramirez, Jimmy Davis, and Jimmy Sherman
“I'm a Man” by Steve Winwood and Jeremy Miller
“Mockingbird” by Inez Foxx and Charles Foxx
“Undun” by Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings
To Christine,
who laughed and cried and lent me to these characters.
Grateful acknowledgment is extended to the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and to the Norwich Free Academy for their generous support of this project.
Thanks to the following, whose encouragement and/or critical response helped shape the book:
Lary Bloom, Theodore Deppe, Barbara Dombrowski, Joan Joffe Hall, Jane Hill, Terese Karmel, Nancy Lagomarsino, Ken Lamothe, Linda Lamothe, Eugenia Leftwich, Ann Z. Leventhal, Pam Lewis, Ethel Mantzaris, Faith Middleton, David Morse, Nancy Potter, Wanda Rickerby, Joan Seliger Sidney, Gladys Swan, and Gordon Weaver.
I also thank John Longo, former third-floor custodian at the University of Connecticut's Homer Babbidge Library, who shared his lunch and conversation with me during the seven summers this story came together and who later taught me a lesson about courage.
I am grateful that this novel fell into the loving care of my agents and friends, Linda Chester and Laurie Fox, whose sharp eyes and warm hearts helped me to prepare the story.
And finally I extend special thanks to my editor and
paisana,
Judith Regan, who, while cradling her week-old daughter Lara in one arm and my manuscript in the other, decided to midwife this novel.
An Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition: She's Still Out There
Our day will come
If we just wait awhile . . .
âRUBY AND THE ROMANTICS
         Toward dawn we shared with you
your hour of desolation,
    the huge lingering passion
         of your unearthly outcry,
as you swung your blind head
    toward us and laboriously opened
         a bloodshot, glistening eye,
in which we swam with terror and recognition.
âFROM “THE WELLFLEET WHALE” BY STANLEY KUNITZ
TO THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
She's Still Out There
D
olores Price first came to me as a voice. I was in the shower after an early morning run, hustling to get ready for my teaching day at the high school where I'd worked for the past nine years. “Well, the dork just left me,” the voice said. “Good riddance.” She was unnamed, not yet visible. But in those eight words, she sounded wounded, irreverent, and funny. I liked her immediately.
A few years earlier, at the age of thirty, I had become a father and begun writing short stories. For my first Father's Day my wife, Christine, gifted me with an electric typewriterâhigh tech at the time. It was 1981. On the day the woman spoke to me about her dorky ex, I had four unpublished stories under my belt. I gave the voice a nameâMary Annâand she began telling me about her marriage and divorce. I thought I was writing short story number five.
I had completed a couple dozen pages of Mary Ann's story on the morning when, for some reason, I recalled a seventeen-year-old girl with whom I had worked ten years earlier while student teaching. Sheila was a lonely, introverted kid who, because of her obesity, couldn't fit at a student desk and, instead, sat at the back of the classroom at a table. Her peers didn't bully her, but because her size made them uncomfortable, they made her invisible. Sheila was complicit in that invisibility. She never spoke, never interacted with the others.
As long as they didn't look behind them, she wasn't there. In my grandiose naïveté, I decided I would save Sheila's life by engaging her in class discussion. But each time I called on her, she shook her head and remained silent. Her fat was a fortress that no rookie teacher was going to penetrate. And so, by the time my student-teaching stint was completed, Sheila was still a mystery. But my sudden recollection of her a decade later hit me like a bolt of lightning. I fused fictional Mary Ann's voice to my visual memory of nonfictional Sheila and my story was suddenly electrified.
