She's Come Undone (Oprah's Book Club) - by Wally Lamb (Paperback)

About the Book

An extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, She's Come Undone tells the story of Dolores Price, a dysfunctional, heartbreakingly comical young heroine, and her wild journey to love, pain, and renewal. "(A) saga of moral liberation".--Glamour.

Book Synopsis

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of three Oprah Book Club Picks including The River Is Waiting--Wally Lamb takes us on an extraordinary journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years.

"Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered...."

Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up.

In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably lovable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections. She's Come Undone includes a promise: you will never forget Dolores Price.

Review Quotes

"...a warm-blooded, enveloping talke of survival...Dolores has a killer mouth and the guts of a sea lion." - Kirkus

"A deeply affecting, often hilarious novel that centers around one of the most extraordinary characters in recent American fiction....She's Come Undone makes us laugh and wince with recognition and reminds us that despite the pain we endure and cause, we must find the courage to love again." - Oprah Book Club

"A heroine to cheer for....This supremely touching journey to adulthood may remind you of The World According to Garp and other sagas of emotional liberation." - Glamour

"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." - Hartford Advocate

"There are at least two surprises in store for readers of Lamb's memorable debut novel. One is the author's sex. This male writes so convincingly in the voice of a female, tracing her life from 4 to 40, that you have to keep looking back at the jacket picture just to make sure. The second surprise is how such a string of trials and tribulations can add up to such a touchingly funny book..." - People

"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." - New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he's that gifted...This novel does what good fiction should do -- it informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the 'simple' act of living a human life." - The Nashville Tennessean

About the Author

Wally Lamb is the author of seven New York Times bestselling novels: The River Is Waiting, I'll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin' and Hopin', The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True, and She's Come Undone. Lamb also edited Couldn't Keep It to Myself and I'll Fly Away, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women's prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. Lamb lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine, and they have three sons.