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



Dolores Price, the protagonist and narrator, opens her “story of craving” (17) by revisiting some of her earliest memories, which she admits are unreliable and foggy. She jokes how she for some reason recalls the men who brought her family’s first television to the home in 1956, when Dolores was four, as being the president and vice president. The television, a gift from Dolores’s father’s boss, Mrs. Masicotte, is what Dolores recalls as the change that triggered a series of events that led to her and her family’s decline.

Dolores also recalls that her mother, Bernice, had a stillbirth when Dolores was seven, sending Bernice into a deep depression and her father into a state of increased frustration. Dolores remembers going out to Fishermen’s Cove with her father, Tony, who pointed out to the water and told her about a whale who became lost in the shallow water there before being guided back out to sea.