Imagine that you've been estranged from your daughter for thirty years. She left home at eighteen because of your bad behavior and terrible choices, but she sends an annual birthday card through her secretary. You don't know how to reconnect but have written a book to say you're sorry, and to somehow explain your life to her.
Now imagine that you're the middle-aged daughter, who left home as a teenager, ashamed of your mother's unconventional life choices. You don't know your extended family or who fathered you, but you're successful and consumed by your work saving battered women--until the mother you've not seen for thirty years dies and you read "Owned," her memoir about being the sex slave of a famous artist. Two intertwined stories, Margaret's and Alexandra's, mother and daughter, come together in an unlikely rapprochement as Alex reads and tries to make sense of her mother's book. A dark S&M romance? A tortured story of sexual abuse? Both versions of their lives, filtered through Margaret's retelling and Alex's memory, clash as the story within unfolds.
Margaret always wanted to reconnect with the daughter who she deeply loved, but she believed she was a bad mother who deserved the punishing silence and estrangement. Would a good mother freely consent to be the sex slave of a master who ignored the safe practices of their unconventional bond, compromising her ability to tend to her daughter's failing health? Accompany Alex on her journey of reconciliation, revisiting her teenage years when the artist did unspeakable things to her mother, forcing her to choose between her master and her child.
Mother and daughter's embedded narratives explore the limits of cruelty, judgment, and forgiveness that one life can offer another as Alex goes in search of the family that her mother has kept hidden, learns the truth of who her father is, and uncovers the secrets of her mother's life that drove her into the arms of the artist. Readers who struggle with the opposing demands of rearing a child while pursuing a romantic relationship may like this book. The mother of a chronically ill child balances a love interest who, at best, assumes godlike status as an alluring master, and at worst, is a callous jerk. The woman, who had a child while she herself was still a child, was sent away to a home to birth her baby anonymously. She defied society's strictures and, with the help of another woman, built a life for herself and her child. Hard-working and determined, but naïve and ill-equipped to handle the sophisticated, complex rules of the BDSM world she fell into, she struggles to find a way out. Catholicism is used as goad and foil to the mother's proclivities--a window through which she understands herself, but also a tool by which her artist master manipulates her.
The daughter's tender coming-of-age story, told through her mother's memoir, adds a counterpoint and complicated texture to her mother's troubling adventures. Readers who like the call and response style to explore the mother/daughter dynamic may empathize with the mother's struggles while simultaneously feeling her daughter's outrage. The mother's dark drama nestles painfully within her daughter's story of rage, grief, and sensemaking.
What complex interplay of life experiences drives a woman to cross boundaries and seek ecstasy in an S&M relationship, territory she doesn't recognize even when it seems all too familiar? What causes her to stay and feel liberated amidst grievous disappointment and pain while society, her daughter, and perhaps the reader judge the relationship as psychopathological? What forces might be stronger than the pull of pain and punishment to compel her to shift loyalties and leave the bubble of fantasy that becomes her all-consuming life?