She's Come Undone

“The harder I pedaled—the more I risked—the better I felt.”

Foreshadowing her later self-harm and suicidal ideation, Dolores admits that as a child she often thrived on risk and danger, seeking to put herself in harm’s way. This sort of enjoyment of harm and risk is something that she grapples with until mid-adulthood.

“Power had made me hungry and I was already eating out of the bag of potato chips.”

Food and gluttony are some of Dolores’s biggest weaknesses, and during her childhood and youth, she develops a desire to hold power over others, mirroring the way it is always held over her. She metaphorically compares this desire for power, which is a constantly flowing theme throughout the novel, to the food she gorges on.

“That’s what life’s all about, Dolores. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.”

Bernice tells Dolores that life is about taking risks when Dolores is still just a child, but it takes Dolores years to realize this for herself. Dolores spends her youth scared and intentionally isolating herself from the world, which becomes a major source of conflict between her and her mother.

“I sighed and smoked and passed the time thumbing through the dog-eared magazines.”

In this sentence, the alliteration and repetition gives it the stylistic impression of sing-song or a poem. During her youth, Dolores feels rebellious and indifferent and refuses to engage with the world. It is often the case that she is simply sitting around, smoking and allowing her mind to be as blank as possible.

“That night I lay in bed with the evening’s images spinning before me. I felt energized, as if electrical current were passing through me.”

Dolores feels enamored by Jack’s charisma and charm at first, and so do her mother and grandmother. This is how Jack snakes his way into their lives to take advantage of them. Dolores is 13 and experiencing her sexual awakening, leaving her especially vulnerable to Jack’s manipulation. She compares the physical feelings she has toward Jack to electrical currents.

“In Ma’s young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.”

Dolores looks at a photograph of her mother when she was a teenager and marvels at how much her mother had both changed and endured. She looks into Bernice’s innocent eyes and knows that this young person had no way of predicting what life would throw at her. All of these traumas in Bernice’s life become Dolores’s, because Bernice was never able to fully overcome them.

“Inside, the stairway wall had turned white and blank, with a network of veinlike cracks. Strips and pieces of the old paper littered the stairway and foyer, rushing like dead leaves under my feet.”

When Grandma’s house is redone following Bernice’s death, Dolores returns to it and finds it has a completely different atmosphere—one of death and emptiness. She personifies the house by calling its cracks veinlike and compares the old wallpaper to the decay of dead leaves. It is as though Grandma is trying to erase her pain.

“Is that where you’re from—Rhode Island? A fatty like you in that little itty bitty state?”

Dolores is unsure how to perceive Dottie, her motivations, or her personality, because Dottie is kind and rude at the same time. Dottie allows Dolores to come into the dorms early, but simultaneously insults her. Dottie is overweight as well, and in insulting Dolores, is also insulting herself. She hopes that she and Dolores can share their misery and loneliness together.

“Part of me enjoyed the panic overtaking her facial muscles. Parents, a boyfriend, a peppy little life: she was overdue someone like me.”

During her childhood and youth, Dolores derives pleasure from other peoples’ pain, hoping to bring them into her misery and ultimately feeling jealous of their happiness. This is exactly how Dolores views Kippy, and as a result, the reader cannot be sure that Dolores’s descriptions of Kippy are accurate. Dolores also self-deprecates here, referring to her own life as horrible in comparison to Kippy’s.

“I reached into my pocket and fingered the edges of the secret Polaroids, the answer to that scary riddle: how women might love men, how men might not be bullies. Resurrection: the word made a pretty sound.”

Dolores keeps the nude Polaroids that Dante sends Kippy and sees them as a symbol of the potential for men to be kind and sensitive. Ironically, when Dolores meets and marries Dante, she finds out that he is not that way at all, and her hope in finding a decent partner drops dramatically. For most of her life, Dolores feels unable to love men or even understand why women would want to try.

“The whale lay surrendered on its belly, its head pointed out to sea. Most of its body sat stuck in shallow, red-clouded water, but the massive black tail reached up onto the beach. Incoming water lapped and channeled around and over it. The larger waves broke against its face.”

The imagery is intense when Dolores describes the beached whale. She notes its position, with its head still in the water as though it wanted the ocean to be the last thing it saw before it died. Alliteration adds to the prose and to the moment itself.

“The eye stared back at me without seeing. The iris was milky and blank, blurred by seawater. A cataract eye, an eye full of death. I reached out and touched the skin just below it, then touched the hard globe itself.”

When Dolores swims next to the dead humpback whale, she describes the whale with detailed imagery that makes the reader feel like they are right next to it, able to smell, touch, and taste it. Dolores stares into its vacant eye and touches it, feeling a connection to the whale and the way it was trapped on the shore. The entire moment is a metaphor for Dolores’s increasing mental instability and her desire to part from the world (which she fights against).

“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.”

Dolores’s job at the photo lab allows her to start reaching out toward the world from a protected and distant position first, before she is fully ready to become part of it. It is the perfect bridge between worlds, and Dolores finds it both inspiring and comforting to know that everyone else seems just as strange as she is. She compares her mental illness to a tumor that was shrunk by this newfound knowledge.

“He wasn’t the boy in the letters. He was. Wasn’t. Was.”

Dolores’s mind flips back and forth, and her constantly changing thoughts are illustrated best with this line. She is always torn between the logical side of herself and the side of her that deeply needs companionship and affection. At the same time, Dante is unpredictable and hard to read, and this doesn’t help Dolores’s already skewed perspective.

“I was twenty-five years old, sitting in the Montpelier library, waiting for the man I loved and who loved me back—but I was also my obese self, pouting up in my bedroom at Grandma’s. My six-year-old self in dungarees, riding with my father through the wet blur of a car wash. An eighth grader in Jack Speight’s MG, my hair whipping in the wind on the way to that dog pound to be destroyed…Except he hadn’t destroyed me after all. Dante had come along and unraped me.”

Here, Dolores refers to herself in terms of the whole person—the parts of her that were, that are, and that will be. She knows that her past is something she can never fully shake off and slowly learns to carry it without so much weight attached. In her honeymoon phase with Dante, Dolores’s mind is fully entrenched in the illusion of love and perfection. She even credits Dante with healing her, though that was something she did herself through years of hard work.

“He was his summer self again for a while, gentle and teasing.”

In this alliterative phrase, Dolores affectionately refers to her husband Dante through the lens of memories that are no longer based in truth. She remembers him being sweet and kind at first, but for how quickly this façade disappeared, it may never have been real at all. This is one of many examples of the unreliability of Dolores’s memories.

“I pictured myself back in Easterly—in the House of Repression—with a small daughter who never saw her father. Having each day to get up and face Grandma, who knew love only got you so far.”

Dolores refers to her grandmother’s house as a house of repression because both she and her mother felt trapped, isolated, and depressed while living there with Grandma. While Dolores is with Dante, she internally comes up with all sorts of excuses for why she could never leave him, including telling herself that she could never be happy in the same house she was once so miserable in.

“I’d sat up here for six years, looking angrily out at life and trying to eat away pain. I saw it clearly now: why Ma had fought so hard for me to go to college—had let awful words bloody her up during those battles about my going off to school. Ma had understood the danger of Grandma’s house—how heavy furniture and drapes drawn on the world could absorb a person until she was freakish and mean and trapped.”

When Dolores returns to her grandmother’s house after she dies, it is a symbolic moment of reflection, reconnection, healing, and understanding. She sees the room she wasted years of her life locked up inside and understands why her mother became so assertive in regard to Dolores’s attending college. She metaphorically refers to the hateful words she said during arguments as battle wounds that she left on her mother.

“My memory always insisted that Grandma had been remote and unforgiving about me and Jack. But there, back again without warning, was that moment.”

Dolores’s unreliable memory comes to the forefront when she realizes that she has always seen her grandmother a certain way, her biases leading her to forget a crucial moment they shared after Dolores was raped. Dolores’s grandmother took a special pebble out of her rosary necklace from the crucifixion road and gave it to Dolores, hoping it would help her feel at peace again. It leads the reader to question what else Dolores may be misremembering.

“I hope you know you’ve got it all wrong. I tried to tell you before. Kids today aren’t innocent. If anything, the little cunt raped us. My career. You and me.”

When Dolores accuses Dante of statutory rape, he uses a common excuse that he was the one taken advantage of and the girl he was involved with was not as naïve as she seemed, thereby twisting the power dynamic around. This mirrors Jack’s suggestion that Dolores was “half-responsible” for her rape. Dante is even bold enough to rope Dolores into his guilt, using the word “us” to describe how his life was ruined after the secret got out. For Dolores, it turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because it allows her to see his true character and finally rid herself of him.

“What was scariest of all was the absence of grief—the way all day long his death kept slipping my mind in the midst of the shows I watched.”

When Dolores’s father dies, she realizes she feels almost nothing for the loss, because she already lost him and let go years before. All her life, she has used television as a distraction, but now, it is more of a background thought—it is as if she would not be thinking of her father, distracted or not.

“Being in your mid-30s brought benefits, I reminded myself. You began to appreciate tidiness, smallness, things in their place. This is the shape your life has taken, I said. Be existential. Go to sleep.”

In the novel’s conclusion, Dolores is approaching middle age and finds herself maturing, becoming more accepting of her life, and developing healthier patterns of self-talk. She metaphorically refers to the shape of her life, knowing that there is nothing she can do to change what has happened.

“Jack Speight undid me, then I almost undid myself. But I’ve undone some of the bad, too, some of the damage. With help. With luck and love...”

The novel’s title, She’s Come Undone, refers both to a song by The Guess Who and to Dolores’s life. Dolores was traumatized and nearly destroyed by what happened to her, and allowed herself to spiral for years. Now, she looks back knowing that she has overcome that part of her life and can look ahead, continuing to heal and hold hope for happiness.