Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession [Hardcover]

Barbara Kent Lawrence (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1999

With sensitivity and compassion, Lawrence chronicles her husband's life-threatening eating disorder from the time when he was an accomplished 6'1" college athlete, through hospitalization and therapy when he weighed just over one hundred pounds, to the final days of their marriage twenty-seven years later. Through Lawrence's startling prose, we bear witness to her husband's obsessive exercising; masochistic starvation methods; and addiction to saunas, laxatives, and ice baths-and the chilling effect his behavior had on the life they had so carefully tried to build.

Taught from childhood that her husband would naturally be her provider, Lawrence finds herself unable to break free from his controlling ways, even when they bring their family to the brink of self-destruction. Forced to examine her own complicity in her husband's illness, and ultimately come to terms with her own childhood demons, Lawrence must make choices that are both painful and dramatic in order to reclaim her life.

Bitter Ice is, finally, a story of triumph-of one woman's gradual awakening-told with all the grace and power of a novel.With sensitivity and compassion, Lawrence chronicles her husband's life-threatening eating disorder from the time when he was an accomplished 6'1" college athlete, through hospitalization and therapy when he weighed just over one hundred pounds, to the final days of their marriage twenty-seven years later. Through Lawrence's startling prose, we bear witness to her husband's obsessive exercising; masochistic starvation methods; and addiction to saunas, laxatives, and ice baths-and the chilling effect his behavior had on the life they had so carefully tried to build.

Taught from childhood that her husband would naturally be her provider, Lawrence finds herself unable to break free from his controlling ways, even when they bring their family to the brink of self-destruction. Forced to examine her own complicity in her husband's illness, and ultimately come to terms with her own childhood demons, Lawrence must make choices that are both painful and dramatic in order to reclaim her life.

Bitter Ice is, finally, a story of triumph-of one woman's gradual awakening-told with all the grace and power of a novel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This revealing but rather suffocating memoir chronicles Lawrence's horrendous 27-year marriage to Tom, a severely disturbed anorexic. Although both came from privileged homes, each of their childhoods was marked by a lack of parental love. Shortly after their marriage, Tom's daily rituals of jogging, followed by alternating ice baths and saunas, began to dominate their lives. His obsession with eating only foods he deemed healthful kept him painfully thin. He also made demands on Lawrence to eat less, even though she was pregnant with their first child. After the birth of their second child, Tom was briefly hospitalized for psychiatric problems, at which time a physician told him, in response to his inquiry, that only women could be anorexic. After his release, Tom's eating disorder became more noticeable, while Lawrence turned into a classic enabler: she isolated herself from family and friends, hid the severity of her husband's condition and did nothing to interfere with his self-destructive bent. Lawrence devotes a good deal of her account to detailing her husband's controlling nature and truly disgusting habits (he was observed spitting into the family's food, among other indecencies), which alienated his children as well as the people hired to work in the real estate office that Tom and she jointly ran. Lawrence's focus is on describing her own unhappiness and suffering, which was considerable, rather than on shedding any light on anorexia, other than highlighting the symptoms. She does, however, accept responsibility for her contribution to this destructive marriage that ended in divorce. Author tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Lawrence has put together a troubling yet fascinating memoir of her marriage to an alcoholic with anorexia and other obsessive-compulsive disorders. She details many of the manifestations of his disease, such as ritualized and prolonged exercise, food binges involving "forbidden" foods, and an intense fear of bloating that prevented him from drinking water. (The "bitter ice" in the title refers to the husband's habit of constantly crunching ice chips to suppress hunger pangs as well as to get some fluid into his body.) What is most disturbing about the book is how long Lawrence stayed with her husband even though his behavior progressively disintegrated. Lawrence does detail her own dysfunctional childhood in an attempt to explain why she felt compelled to stay with someone who constantly denigrated her. Although she eventually broke free of him, it is obvious that writing this book was an attempt to exorcise some leftover demons. Recommended.APamela A. Matthews, Gettysburg Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Rob Weisbach Books (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688162150
• ISBN-13: 978-0688162153
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,944,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A courageous story - riveting, disturbing, important, November 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession (Hardcover)

Bitter Ice is compelling for those of us who have wondered to the point of agonizing about why smart and successful women stay in relationships destructive to themselves and their children. Barbara Lawrence details the evolution of the individuals in this particular relationship and the dynamics of the relationship itself. Her chronicle reminds me of a Stephen King horror story where pretty normal people and situations begin, almost imperceptively, to go awry. By the time things have become completely warped and unacceptable to the observer, the participants themselves have bought into their lives through a combination of denial, rationalization and self doubt and are living in a way they think of as "normal". Coming from a family with an alcoholic parent, I think it is courageous and important that the author shed light for all of us by sharing very personal information. All of us in situations similar to hers learn first and foremost to keep secrets. And keeping those secrets ultimately leads to our own emotional destruction. This story is sad and tragic for the author's whole family including the father. To me, the saddest part was when the author looked at photographs of her absent children and asked herself why she has photographs of those she loves instead of having them. As children, our inclination is to blame our parents for what is wrong in our lives. This book has helped me to better understand them, and in the case of the living, have hope for them. And ultimately, to forgive them. Only then can we begin to build healthy and happy lives for ourselves instead of becoming casualties of our upbringing. For this family, I hope that through telling the secrets and all that implies, they can each finally find personal happiness and a better life.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Painful Read, March 12, 2000

By 

Clara Allmond Zurn Belli (New Delhi, INDIA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession (Hardcover)

Many parts of Bitter Ice were difficult for me to read. This was the first book, of the many that I have read on eating disorders, that made me realize what damage this obsessive behavior does to the family members of the sufferer. I battled anorexia for most of high school and college. While basically "cured," the intense selfishness of my disorder never allowed me to see what pain I brought to my family and friends. Only in reading Barbara Kent Lawrence's honest account do I now understand what my own family was facing. This book has brought me a few steps closer to my own recovery.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GROUNDBREAKING, May 15, 2000

By 

Kathy Kreicas - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession (Hardcover)

In Bitter Ice Barbara Kent Lawrence takes us into a life only those of us with relatives who suffer from eating disorders can imagine. Other readers may be incredulous watching as her husband "Tom" deteriorates, withering from a robust athlete to a dry husk of a man, a man so consumed by his illness that he can hardly relate to anything in the world around him. But we know that is the power and tragedy of eating disorders. Bitter Ice is a beautiful and brave book that describes a slow descent into hell from which Lawrence retrieves herself with the help of her friends and family. Bitter Ice shows us the complexity of relationships patterned by culture and colored by context, but still the responsibility of each of us as individuals. And finally, Bitter Ice shows us that eating disorders are NOT "for women only." Over a million men suffer from ED in this country alone, and 40% of college students with bulimia are men. Still, too many people still think, as Tom's psychiatrist did, "Oh, men can't be anorexic, that's a woman's disease." This is a book for anyone who has ever been affected by obsessive or co-dependent behavior, or by anyone who cares about. In short, ,most of us will find ourselves in Bitter Ice.