Bound: A Daughter, a Domme, and an End-of-Life Story by Elizabeth Anne Wood

Join us for this tour from June 24 to July 10, 2020!



Book Details:

Book Title:  Bound: A Daughter, a Domme, and an End-of-Life Story by Elizabeth Anne Wood

Category:  Adult non-fiction 18 yrs +,  296 pages

Genre:  Memoir

Publisher:  She Writes Press.

Release date:   August 2019

Content Rating:  PG-13 + M. In addition to its primary
focus on confronting terminal illness in the context of a complex
mother-daughter relationship, this book addresses mature themes of
sexuality (specifically BDSM), death, and illness. Conversations about
sexuality are related, sex toys and body parts are mentioned by name,
but there are no actual erotic sex scenes. There are healthcare scenes
that describe procedures and bodily functions and fluids. There is a
fair amount of poop in some scenes. The F-word appears once, on page
167, used in an expletive sense. The word "shit" appears twice, once as
an expletive on p. 51 and once in reference to bodily waste and also
metaphorically.

 Book Description:



What happens when a forty-something, community college sociology
professor learns that her mother―a charming, passive-aggressive, and
needy woman who hasn’t had a lover in decades―has started seeing men who
want to be bound, whipped, and sexually dominated? What happens when
that same mother, shortly after diving into her newly discovered
sexuality, develops a cancer that forces her to accept radical changes
to her body, and then another that forces her, and everyone around her,
to confront her mortality? In Bound, Elizabeth Anne Wood addresses these
questions as she chronicles the last eight months of her mother’s
life―a period she comes to see, over the course of months, as a
maternity leave in reverse: she is carrying her mother as she dies.
Throughout their journey, Wood uses her notebook as a shield to keep
unruly emotions at bay, often taking comfort in her role as advocate and
forgetting to “be the daughter,” as one doctor reminds her to do.
Meanwhile, her mother’s penchant for denial and her childlike tendency
toward magical thinking lead to moments of humor even as Wood battles
the red tape of hospital bureaucracies, the frustration of planning in
the midst of an unpredictable illness, and the unintentional inhumanity
of a health care system that too often fails to see the person behind
the medical chart.


In honor of her mother's birthday, Dr. Wood has arranged to the price of the e-book to $0.99 for the length of this tour (June 24, 2020 to July 10, 2020)

Buy the Book:

Amazon.com ~ Barnes & Noble

Indiebound ~ Kew and Willow*

Add to Goodreads

* Kew and Willow is Dr. Wood's local indie bookstore. If you
put a comment in the order form saying that you want a signed copy,
they'll call the author to come down and sign your book. They also do a
lovely wrapping job.

Meet the Author:



Elizabeth Anne Wood is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Nassau
Community College in Garden City, NY. She is also Senior Strategist for
Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the nation’s only human rights organization
working full time to protect sexual freedom as a fundamental human
right. She earned her PhD at Brandeis University in 1999 and has written
critically about sexuality and society ever since. Born on an Army base
in Kentucky, Wood grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and now
divides her time between Queens, New York and Jamaica Plain, Boston. She
is a devoted fan of Amtrak and an avowed cat person.



​Connect with the author:  Website  ~  Twitter ~ Facebook ~ Instagram

Interview with Dr. Elizabeth Anne Wood

How long have you been writing?

I’ve been writing since I was a child. I still have my copy of Dr. Seuss’s My Book About Me, which I filled in happily and with help when I was about 5 years old. Not long after that I wrote a short book of words to help teach my sister how to read. It was written with crayon on construction paper. I also have the first book I ever wrote and “published,” when I was in 5th grade. The book is called The Adventures of Mina the Monkey and I wrote it for our school’s Young Author’s contest. Mina was a misfit monkey who preferred lettuce to bananas and could never manage to stay with the group. We wrote these with pen and ink, and even had templates to use so we could keep our lines straight, and we learned how to bind them with oaktag covers and cloth bindings. In Bound there’s a scene where I remember the way I used to talk to myself as a kid walking home from the bus stop - like Mina, I was a misfit - and one of the things I would do was pretend I was being interviewed about some new novel I’d just published. I didn’t realize it would take until I was in my late 40s before I’d publish a real-live-sold-in-bookstores kind of book.

What advice do you have for budding writers? 

Tell the stories that feel real and vivid and true. Write the stories you want to read. Write because you’re driven to, because the ideas in your head need an outlet. Worry less about marketing than about the quality of your story. Lots of bestsellers lack the insight and literary quality of many books that sell fewer copies. 

Embrace revision. Listen to criticism and to praise with equal eagerness. Be willing to tear your work apart and rebuild it. Writing is not a linear process. It’s a process of accretion. Oh, and keep all the scraps. You never known when you’ll need them!

One of the main themes in Bound is the difficulty people have talking about sex and death. Why do you think it’s so hard for doctors in particular to talk to patients about sex or death?

I think it’s fascinating that sex and death remain hard to talk about despite how pervasive the representations of them are in our media. Game of Thrones comes to mind immediately! But very few of our media representations of sex and death depict the most common experiences of these facets of our lives. Nor do we see enough thoughtful conversations about them. So that’s one thing: at least in the dominant culture we don’t have a lot of modeling of these things. 

Specifically related to medicine: doctors don’t typically get much training in talking about sex with their patients, or even in sexuality in general. And death is hard for many doctors to talk about because so many are trained to see death as a failure of treatment. The focus is on healing, not on creating the best death possible for a person.

You use Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as a touchstone throughout the book. Why is she so important to you?

I first encountered Buffy at a point in my life when I was pretty depressed and trying to get over a terrible break up. It was so easy to see bits of myself in each of the main characters, and so comforting to see them all fighting demons and preventing the apocalypse together. 

Many adult children of alcoholics will recognize the tendency to be hypervigilant, to have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. “She alone will stand against the forces of darkness,” and all that. As I was growing up, and as an adult child, I often saw myself as a person helping my mother fight her demons. Buffy gave me a metaphor for that. When my mother was sick, the Buffy metaphors became all the more vivid. I took on different roles (Buffy, Willow, Giles, Xander), terminal illness was the hellmouth, and the cancer symptoms, chemo side effects, and resulting infections were the demons that needed to be battled back. 

Buffy was a source of comfort and a way for me to make sense of what was, ultimately, an incredibly difficult and painful experience.

Tour Schedule:



June 24 – Working Mommy Journal – book review / giveaway

June 25 – Book Corner News and Reviews – book spotlight / giveaway

June 25 - Literary Flits – book spotlight / giveaway

June 26 – Books for Books – book review

June 29 – I'm Into Books – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway

June 29 - T's Stuff – book spotlight / author interview / giveaway

June 30 –Pen Possessed - book spotlight / giveaway

July 1 – Svetlanas reads and views – book review / guest post

July 1 - Lamon Reviews - book spotlight / author interview

July 2 – Leels Loves Books – book review / giveaway

July 5 – Cheryl's Book Nook – book review / giveaway

July 7 – Sefina Hawke's Books – book spotlight / giveaway

July 8 – Jazzy Book Reviews – book review / giveaway

July 10 - Adventurous Jessy - book review / giveaway

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