She's Come Undone

Content Warning: This section contains descriptions of child sexual abuse, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, suicidal ideation, sizeism, and self-harm.

Dolores Price is the protagonist and narrator of She’s Come Undone. The story chronicles her life from age four until her mid-thirties, based on her own admittedly biased and sometimes foggy recollections. Dolores’s early years are shaped by the introduction of television in the 1950s, the gender norms that led to the abuse her mother experienced and the freedom she was robbed of, and her own traumatic experiences surrounding sex, manipulation, and a loss of self-control. Dolores often puts herself down and blames herself for the things that go wrong in her life, such as Rita’s miscarriage and Bernice’s death: “I deserved this pain—deserved more, even, than what I was feeling. It was me who deserved death, not Ma” (146). She believes that the stress she caused her mother led to Bernice’s death and comes to view herself as “fat Dolores, mother killer, the girl who deserved nothing but shit” (187).

Dolores’s attachment to New England and to humpback whales is clear throughout the novel. She spends her entire life in the region, moving from place to place but never really leaving.