Content warning: I share some personal stories about self-harm and mental illness. If you need professional help, call the 988 hotline for crisis support.
Yesterday, I finished a novel called She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb. It came out in 1992, and I had wanted to read it at some point because it was an Oprah’s Book Club pick, but I was too young to read it. I finally decided to pick it up because I had always been curious about Wally Lamb’s books and had not made the time to read them before. I am glad I finally got around to reading the book because I was dealing with my crush rejecting me and panic attacks, and I didn’t know how to deal. I have struggled with self-hatred for much of my life, and I have found that reading has always brought me comfort whenever I deal with any negative feelings or tough experiences. So, I went to my local library and found a copy of She’s Come Undone, ready for me to bring it home and read. Honestly, I don’t know if I have ever met anyone like Dolores Price. She is sarcastic, fierce, and resilient, and honestly, I felt as if I had made a new (fictional) friend.
The novel takes place in 1956, in Rhode Island, and Dolores Price’s family gets a television set. The TV serves as a form of escapism for young Dolores as she deals with a tumultuous childhood. Her father is having an affair with a woman he works for, Mrs. Masicotte, and Dolores’ mom, Bernice, is pregnant with her second child. Dolores is excited to have a baby brother, but during the birth, the baby gets strangled with the umbilical cord when emerging from Bernice’s womb and dies, leaving Bernice and her husband grieving. Dolores’s dad leaves Bernice and Dolores for Mrs. Masicotte, and Bernice falls into a deep depression. Dolores’s grandmother lives with Dolores and her mom and is very conservative and religious, shaming Dolores and her mom for their lifestyle. Dolores starts eating a lot of junk food and continues to stay in and watch TV while her mother smokes and doesn’t take care of herself. Dolores gains weight and becomes the target of vicious bullying at school. A new 20-something couple, Rita and Jack Speight, move in with Dolores and her mom in the same housing complex, and at first, they hit it off well. Jack comes off as attractive and charming, and Dolores finds him attractive, too, but then he starts coercing Dolores to ride in his car and touches her inappropriately. One evening, when Dolores is just thirteen years old, Jack leads her into a dark alley and rapes her. The trauma Dolores suffers at the hands of Jack continues to follow her well into her adulthood, and she continues to gain weight and eat as a coping mechanism for dealing with her trauma. She gains weight and everyone stares at her. Her only friends are Roberta, who works at a tattoo parlor and has the same sarcastic humor as Dolores, and Mr. Pucci, her guidance counselor from school. Mr. Pucci encourages Dolores to go to college, but Dolores refuses because she doesn’t think she has a future going to college. Mr. Pucci tells her and her mom, Bernice, that if Dolores doesn’t go to college, she will regret it. After a lot of arguments with her mom and grandmother about not wanting to go to college, Dolores applies to college. She gets rejected by school after school but finally gets admitted to Merton College in Wayland, Pennsylvania. However, Dolores and her mom have an argument one evening and Dolores refuses to go to college, much to her mom’s disappointment. Bernice, tired, goes off to work at the toll booth, and is killed in an accident. Even though she is reluctant to go to college, Dolores does so because she knew her mother would want her to go.
She goes off to college and meets her roommate, Kippy, who doesn’t like her because she is overweight. Before going to college, Dolores lies about her identity in her letters to Kippy because she doesn’t want Kippy to know about that she is overweight, that her mom is dead and that she was raped at 13. Dolores wants to present Kippy with this perfect image of her and lies about having a boyfriend and a stable family, but it backfires when Kippy meets Dolores in person. Kippy feels that Dolores lied to her and they already start off their rooming relationship on rough footing. There is one other person in the college dormitory who is overweight and an outcast like Dolores, and that is Dottie. Dottie, who is a lesbian, falls in love with Dolores and sleeps with her, and Dolores feels ashamed to be around Dottie because she wants to fit in with the thin girls in the dormitory. The other girls gossip about Dottie, and Dottie tells Dolores to not get involved with the girls, especially because Kippy makes a really hurtful comment out of earshot that she would have killed herself if she had been overweight like Dolores. Kippy takes advantage of Dolores, making Dolores her personal servant, having her grab sodas and food for her and making her do all her errands. Dolores seeks solace in the letters that Kippy’s boyfriend, Dante, sends her, and steals the letters from Kippy because she doesn’t think Kippy deserves someone as handsome and charming as Dante. Still grappling with the traumatic death of her mom, Dolores feels like she has no one to turn to, and she ends up leaving Dottie’s house after a one-night stand and poisoning the fish in Dottie’s fish tank with chemicals. She hitches a ride from a West Indian immigrant who lives in the same neighborhood as Dottie, and they drive to the Tri-State area. The driver, Domingos, tells her about a bunch of beached whales on a local beach, and drives Dolores over to see them. The first time she hears the whales crying, she is overwhelmed and yells at Domingos to get her away from the beach and to go back to driving her to where she needs to be.
In part two, Dolores ends up in a mental health institution after her grandmother has been trying to locate her. Dolores sees a therapist, and he tries to get her to open up about her trauma, but Dolores is reluctant to do so. After several sessions, the therapist has Dolores swim in the pool and has her recall all of the painful memories from her childhood, namely Jack raping her at 13 and her mom dying in an accident. Even though the therapist thinks he is helping, Dolores tells him that she is better and wants to discontinue therapy, even after the therapist pleads for her to not go because he doesn’t think she has finished the inner work she needs to do to recover from her trauma. Dolores later ends up tracking down Dante, her college roommate’s ex-boyfriend, and they begin to live with each other. At first, Dante seems charming, and Dolores thinks that he will love her as long as she hides her past from him (her being overweight, the sexual assault, her mom’s death, etc.) However, Dante becomes more controlling and abusive, and Dolores sees that he is not as charming as his letters to Kippy in college made him out to be. One evening, Dante asks Dolores if she is on birth control before they have sex, and Dolores lies and says that she is. However, her life changes when she becomes pregnant. Dolores is hesitant about getting an abortion, but Dante forces her to do so, and Dolores ends up going through the abortion and mourning the loss of her unborn daughter, Vita Marie. This reminded me of the movie Waves because in the movie, there is a teenage couple named Tyler and Alexis who are at the center of the film, and they have unprotected sex, and Alexis ends up pregnant with Tyler’s baby. Tyler tries to calm her down and they go to an abortion clinic. On the way home, Alexis cries and tells Tyler that she doesn’t think she can go through with the abortion. Tyler gets angry at her for changing her mind and wanting to keep the baby, and shouts insults at her, even when she tells him that it’s her body and she can make her own decision about whether she wants to keep the baby or not. In She’s Come Undone, when Dolores aborts her unborn baby, she feels a lot of grief and shame, but Dante doesn’t really care about her feelings. Dante loses his job as a teacher after he sleeps with a high school student, and he starts becoming more sedentary and spends his days locked in his room brainstorming half-assed poems. Dolores realizes that her marriage to Dante is extremely codependent, and she felt she had to hide her authentic self from him so that he wouldn’t leave her. Thankfully, Dolores’s old friend, Roberta, comes by and they spend time together. I love the part when Dante tells Roberta and Dolores to keep it down while he is upstairs meditating about poems, and Roberta bluntly tells him from downstairs that he needs to lighten up and that life is too short to act so serious all the time. Later on, Dolores confronts Dante at a fast-food restaurant about his erratic behavior and confesses about her past sexual trauma and the abuse she suffered growing up. She also tells Dante how much of a hypocrite he is because she went vegetarian because he was vegetarian, but now he has stopped being vegetarian and is eating meat again. She tells him how hurt she is that he slept with other women, many of them his high school female students, and that she used to be overweight. Dante doesn’t want to hear any of it because he wants to continue to control Dolores’s life, but finally he angrily lashes out at her and punches the restaurant manager and leaves the restaurant. Dolores finally wins her freedom from Dante after the divorce and spends her time with Roberta, who helps her learn how to live as a newly independent single woman.
Also, when I thought about this book, I thought about this memoir that I had read last year called I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, who was a child actor in a show called iCarly. To be honest, I never saw iCarly because I stopped watching a lot of TV around the time that it came out on Nickelodeon, but by the end of reading her memoir, I just wanted to give Jennette a huge hug because I was crying throughout the book. In the book, Jennette describes the traumatic abuse she suffered at the hands of her perfectionist mother, Debra McCurdy, who died of cancer in 2013 when Jennette was 21. Honestly, the emotional and psychological abuse that Jennette’s mother put her through was painful to read about, and by the time I got to the scene when Jennette is recovering from bulimia, I wept because I just could not imagine the pain this young woman went through. Jennette’s book showed me that grief is complicated, and that recovery from abuse is a long journey. There is one part of the book where Jennette falls in love with a guy, and she thinks that he is the perfect partner. He tells her to get professional help when he finds vomit stains on their toilet and finds out that Jennette has been struggling with bulimia. Jennette goes through a long period of recovery and reading about how she recovered from years of anorexia and bulimia made me have mad respect for anyone who has had to go through an eating disorder and go through recovery, because recovering from any psychological disorder, be it depression, schizophrenia, or any eating disorder, is far from easy. I remember when I was trying to stop cutting myself in college, and it was very hard. Unfortunately, the therapist I was seeing at the time was not helpful and didn’t take my problem with cutting seriously, so I felt I had no one to turn to. When my parents found out I was harming myself when I got back from college, I felt ashamed. I even went back during my spring semester that year wearing a lot of long-sleeved shirts because I didn’t want people to see that I had harmed myself. There have been many ups and downs with me trying to stop harming myself well after college, and there have been a few times just these past few weeks where I had to reach out to the Suicide Hotline for help because I was just in a very dark place. But I am getting better and taking antidepressants, exercising, re-engaging with my hobbies and trying to practice more self-love through my Buddhist practice.
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