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"My husband had anorexia" A gripping memoir looks at a man's obsession—and a woman's struggle to help him,
BY JENNIFER SOONGWhen Barbara Kent Lawrence married Tom, he was a healthy, 6' 1" former college athlete. During the course of their 27-year marriage, he starved himself down to just over a hundred pounds. His obsessive exercising and food rituals took over their marriage and family life. In Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Obsession (Rob Weisbach Books), Lawrence, now 56, recalls the struggle to reclaim her independence. She recently spoke with Redbook.
Q. When did you start to notice your husband's odd behavior about food?
A. I noticed certain things right after we were married. His table manners were gross—he used so much ketchup and mustard that you couldn't even see the food. The problems accelerated over the years. He would sometimes chew food, put it in a napkin, and stuff it into a drawer. He would eat ice instead of food.
Q. Was he also compulsive about exercise?
A. Yes, he would exercise when it was clearly painful. He would climb mountains with a backpack full of rocks and wear shoes that made his feet bleed.
Q. Why did he do it?
A. Tom had inherited a circulatory problem [Reynaud's phenomenon] from his mother. For her, it turned into a serious disease that eventually killed her. So he claimed he was exercising to improve his circulation. But I think his anorexia stemmed from a profound lack of self-confidence. His obsessions controlled his entire life and the lives of everyone around him.
Q. Did you try to get help?
A. We were both incredibly naive and in denial. Tom would periodically see a doctor, and he'd get better for a while, but since male anorexia is not a well- known illness, there wasn't anybody who was able to offer lasting help. He'd struggle so hard to control himself, but the obsession was overwhelming.
Q. How did Tom's sickness affect your relationship with him?
A. When you're starving yourself, your brain doesn't work very well. We had opened a real estate and construction business, and he was very forgetful with our clients. He was rude and abrasive with me and the people around us.
Q. You have two kids. How did they respond to their father's obsession?
A. The kids were careful around him, trying to please him. One time Stephen and Katherine [who were in their teens at the time] and I were trying to plan a family outing. We figured out that the only thing we could do together that would accommodate Tom's rigid exercising schedule was miniature golf. We all deferred to him, like he was a sick child. We didn't make demands on him. But the way we were living was shameful.
Q. Why did you stay?
A. I was scared. I didn't want to fail in marriage, and I thought it would be worse for my kids. Also, I was always hoping that things would improve. We'd go through cycles of my saying, "I can't stand this. I can't live like this. You have got to stop chewing ice or hiding food," and he'd feel terrible. I always believed, and he did, too, that he'd eventually get better.
Q. Did you have anyone to turn to?
A. Unfortunately, we were all focused on secrecy. We kept retreating from everyone. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Maine when we were contemplating moving there from Greenwich, CT. I looked around and felt that it was somehow safer there. People wouldn't look at Tom so sharply, and his horrendous table manners would be less conspicuous in a remote area.
Q. Were you protecting him?
A. On the surface, yes. I became more and more of a shield between him and the rest of the world. People were scared to approach Tom, so they would come to me to complain about his behavior. They would say, "Can't you do something about the way he eats or the way he behaves in public?" I finally decided that I was being unfair to him because I wasn't forcing him to deal with the consequences of his own actions.
Q. So you ultimately did end the marriage. Was there a turning point?
A. Two events really struck home for me. People from the office had told me that Tom would steal their food to eat in secret, but I never believed them. Finally, a young woman told me that Tom had taken the meat out of her carefully wrapped sandwich and then put it all back together and put it back in the brown paper bag she'd written her name on and sealed with tape. The second incident occurred at our dining room table: Tom kept accusing me of minor, silly things—to force me to react and yell at him. I remember he looked at me as if he were a wounded child. I thought, "He's making me become somebody I don't want to be." At that moment, I realized that if I was going to survive, I had to get out—to give us all a chance.
Q. Do you blame Tom for what happened?
A. No. We were two decent, well-intentioned people who got caught in something—a deeply rooted illness—that we didn't understand. I've come to see my own complicity: My covering up for his self-destructive behavior did not help him or our family.
Q. What do you want people to learn from your experience?
A. I've always been a private person, so going public with my life has been odd. But there are a lot of men with anorexia. For them, there's the double shame of having a "woman's illness." I'm hoping that talking about the problem will help people deal with it and heal.
Email: barbaralawrence@attbi.com