It also helped that I got the audio
How is it the man?
What's more is that I didn't even know this was an Oprah's Book Club pick until after I finished it and looked for reviews on Ammy.  That said, I am impressed with Wally Lamb's writing, because he genuinely fooled me into thinking he was a female writer.  It also helped that I got the audio book featuring the performing talent of the impressive Linda Stephens.Delores Price is a sad person whose life story begins in 1956 when her family gets a TV set as a gift to her family through the courtesy of her philandering father's mistress.  Delores recounts the destruction of herself and her family from that first day when she is merely 4 years old, a dismal tale of a child who goes largely ignored after her mother has a miscarriage, effectively ignoring her little girl, and her father begins to become more verbally and physically abusive.  Her father eventually leaves Delores and her mother until her mother has a mental breakdown and our poor little heroine is sent off to live with her grandmother, a racist, Bible-belting harpie who makes her success with other neighborhood children virtually impossible.  Eventually, Delores's mother comes back home from the hospital, gets a new job, and starts dating lots of guys--including sleeping with the married boarder upstairs who ends up raping a 13 year-old Dolores.  From there on things get worse.  Dolores gets fat, her mother fights with her constantly until she is killed by a drunk driver, and then Delores goes off to college, suffering one embarrassing situation after another until a family friend pays for a seven year stay in a mental institution.  Through unfinished therapy and a bad marriage, this girl goes through everything you can imagine, and then some.  This book is fast paced and throws in every situation imaginable until it plays out like a controversial and tacky miniseries.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, however.  Along the way, Lamb puts in some great laugh-out-loud dialog along with some truly disturbing and tear-jerking moments.If you love very highly charged stories with lots of tragedy and trash, you will love this book.  There are some very touching people in this story, and Lamb shows that people are neither good nor bad--we all have moments of weakness as much as our better traits--and nobody is infallible.  If this book seems too trashy and rediculous to swallow, I would recommend somebody more on the level of Meg Hutchinson.  Personally, I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't get it for keeps. 