Addiction
Edie's addiction is the thread which weaves these disparate lives together. Her family becomes consumed with concern for her health and her obsession with food. Unfortunately for everyone involved addiction is an extremely complex and painful experience. It requires more than merely resisting the obsession. For Edie, this problem is rooted in her self-perception, based upon childhood emotional neglect. While she experiences the affection and love and concern of her children and grandchildren, she feels isolated from them. They do not understand her experiences and are often frightened by her relationship to food.
Compensation
The characters in this family all fail to communicate well and consequently compensate their unspoken hurts in surprising ways in their personal lives. The basic idea is that one unacknowledged or suppressed feeling, over years, finds release somewhere else in that person's life. For Benny this looks like a personality defined by compassion and open-mindedness, but he's married to Rochelle, who is the polar opposite of his own mother in every way. Rochelle is obsessed with her health and worries over Benny all day everyday, filling a need for which Edie didn't have the emotional capacity to offer Benny. While Benny needs someone to care about his well-being and physical health and to provide some structure in his life, he doesn't need the nagging or even demeaning comments which often accompany Rochelle's concern.
Miscommunication
As mentioned before, Edie's family is not well suited to communication. They repress their feelings. And when they do attempt to communicate, they're so out of practice that it comes out all wrong. For instance, Robin is worried that her mom won't live much longer if she doesn't change her habits around diet and exercises. She genuinely cares for her mother, but she expresses this through dictating and even sometimes through shaming Edie. Naturally this approach makes Edie feel worse and increasingly self-conscious about how she relates to Robin, so that she is worse off than before. Everyone means well, but their methods are not very effective due to frequent miscommunications.
