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ABOUT THE BOOK
An intimate, revealing, and refreshingly frank memoir, Bitter Ice tells the story of a wife's search for independence and identity while living in the shadow of her husband's battle with anorexia.
With sensitivity and compassion, Barbara Kent Lawrence chronicles her husband's life-threatening eating disorder from the time they married 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 the 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.
Email: barbaralawrence@attbi.com