Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession

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.)