She's Come Undone

Content Warning: This section contains descriptions of child sexual abuse, domestic violence, suicidal ideation, sizeism, and self-harm. The source material also contains sizeist slurs, which are reproduced in this guide only in quotations. 

She’s Come Undone chronicles the life of Dolores Price as she experiences significant trauma during childhood and attempts to heal. Throughout much of the book, Dolores is overweight and experiences stigma regarding her size, which she internalizes, resulting in self-hatred as well as suicidal ideation and self-harm.

Weight stigma and sizeism—discrimination or bias based upon this stigma—like that Dolores experiences remain prevalent. According to psychologist Rebecca Puhl, “Sizeism is one of the most deeply entrenched stigmas in today’s society, partly because of sociocultural ideals tying thinness to core American values such as hard work and individualism” (Abrams, Zara, “The Burden of Weight Stigma,” Monitor on Psychology, vol. 53, no. 2, 2022). Numerous studies highlight the effects of weight stigma, which negatively impacts both physical health outcomes and mental health. For instance, researchers found in a 2021 study that people who experience weight stigma are more likely to engage in several behaviors that negatively impact health, including disordered eating and excessive alcohol use, and they are also more likely to experience sleep disturbances (Lee, Kristen M., Hunger, Jeffery M. & Tomiyama, A. Janet, “Weight Stigma and Health Behaviors: Evidence from the Eating in America Study,” International Journal of Obesity, vol. 45, pp. 1499-1509, 2021). In the novel, Dolores often turns to large volumes of food, such as an entire beef roast, to self-soothe during periods of stress or low self-esteem.

Another researcher, Jeffery Hunger, found in 2016 that the impacts of being judged based on weight are so significant that anxiety related to weight stigma starts before someone even experiences it. In Hunger’s study, participants who believed their weights would be listed on (fictional) online dating profiles experienced anticipatory anxiety that they might be judged or stigmatized based on their size (Abrams). The novel depicts a similar situation when Dolores creates a fake persona to mislead her future college roommate, Kippy, believing she won’t be accepted as her real self.

The novel’s portrayal of body image issues and the mental health concerns related to them is, for the most part, sensitive, particularly for the time in which it was written: Beauty standards of the 1990s reflected a particular emphasis on thin bodies for women and a new rise in dieting culture. However, because Dolores is writing from her own (biased) perspective, she at times refers to herself in a harsh, degrading tone that reaffirms the stereotypes people place upon her, such as when she refers to herself as a “fat monster face” (237). Further, because Dolores experiences both internalized and external shame due her weight, and because losing weight becomes such a major part of her transformation and healing process, the portrayal of her weight and relationship to it can be interpreted as contributing to negative stereotypes of people who are overweight. Contemporary movements, such as the body positivity and fat acceptance movements, encourage people to love and accept themselves and engage in healthy activities at any size, pushing back at the notion that weight loss is a prerequisite for health or happiness. At the same time, Wally Lamb portrays Dolores’s weight loss as something that happens naturally as she heals her specific traumas, which resolves her disordered patterns of eating and results in a healthier outlook on life.