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

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.