Tuesday 3rd November 2009
by Caroline
I am a tall woman, and I’ve carried an oscillating 10 to 60 extra pounds since graduating from high school. A friend and I were talking about books one day, and she said something about She’s Come Undone, assuming I’d read it. When she found out I hadn’t, she said, as though handing me a precious truism, “Any woman who’s ever had any kind of issues about her weight should read this book.”
The book’s heroine Dolores goes through an unbelievable amount of twists and turns, in a story trajectory that reminded me of John Irving’s World According to Garp. After a scary, terrible adolescent trauma, she and her mother both feed Dolores’s feelings until she is represented and embodied by her obesity. The book follows her process of worsening, bottoming out, and recovering.
Author Wally Lamb uses Dolores’s hindsight as an effective narrative tool — the book’s several large sections usually begin with Dolores looking back and summarizing the actions that have taken place since we last caught up with her, then describing them in detail over the course of that section. It feels very natural, reading a series of personal news digests that somehow came to life. Lamb’s writing has a cinematic quality because of the way he presents dialogue as the primary story mover, but the really winning element is Dolores’s inner monologue. She is acidic and full of doubts, never putting anyone down more than she does herself. And this, I suspect, rings true with many women who experienced insecurity or live with it still.
Many of the women I know and love have learned to eat their insecurities, figuratively — to digest them until they no longer guide our lives. After that, the memory informs the way we live our lives but does not dictate it, and although the insecurity can flare up, can take us over in brief bouts, we’ve learned to recognize it. In its own way, that is an enormous gift, one for which I am unspeakably grateful.
Do you ever read something and there’s one line or maybe two that sticks in your mind long after? In She’s Come Undone it happened to me about two thirds through. Dolores has gotten a job in a photo plant. “Developing pictures further reduced my craziness — shrunk it down like a tumor. It was a matter of perspective, I began to see. The whole world was crazy; I’d flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.”
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