ELIZABETH ANNE WOOD’S AGING MOTHER—a charming, passive-aggressive, and needy woman who hasn’t had a lover in decades—has just started seeing men who want to be bound, whipped, and sexually dominated when she is diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer. It is up to Wood, a feminist sociologist with a full-time job, to simultaneously shepherd her mother through the bureaucracy and unintentional inhumanity of the healthcare system and try to help her face death—just as she’s begun to truly enjoy life.

Reviews:

“Bound is a deeply honest, unflinching portrait of a daughter’s relationship with her mother at the end of life… both a brilliant meditation on helplessness and power, and a stirring testament to the strength of bonds between people who care for each other.”

—VICTORIA PITTS-TAYLOR, PHD, Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University, and author of The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics

“Elizabeth Wood puts a human face on our healthcare crisis. She offers a loving testimony to her mother—who lived life exuberantly as an elder dominatrix—and an indictment of the way our healthcare system treats those least able to advocate for themselves.”

—JOAN PRICE, author of the award-winning Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex and the forthcoming Sex After Grief: Navigating Your Sexuality after the Loss of your Beloved

“Told with courage, honesty, humor, warmth, and insight, Bound offers readers a front-row seat to the negotiations between a daughter, her unconventional mother, and other family as they face the medical-emotional whiplash of terminal illness. This book is filled with love and promises to be a wonderful companion for anyone faced with caregiving.”

—VIRGINIA A. SIMPSON, PHD, FT, award-winning author of The Space Between: A Memoir of Mother-Daughter Love at the End of Life