re-print of the french best-seller

The incredible confessions of a thrillingly unconventional woman. From the first page, this chronicle
of dominance and submission will keep you gasping with its vivid depictions of sensual abandon. At
the hand of Masters Georges, Patrick, Pierre and others, this submissive seductress experiences
pleasures she never knew existed…

“I am not sentimental, yet I love my Master and do not hide the fact. He is everything that is
intelligent, charming and strict. Of course, like every self-respecting master, he sometimes appears
very demanding, which pains and irritates me when he pushes me to the limits of my moral and
physical resistance. My Master is impassioned, and he lives only for his passion: sadomasochism.
This philosophy, for it is one, represents in his eyes an ideal way of life, but I am resolutely opposed
to that view. One cannot, one must not be a sadomasochist the whole time. The grandeurs and
constraints of everyday life do not live happily with fantasies. One must know how to protect one
from the other by separating them openly. When the master and the slave live together, they must
have the wisdom to alternate the sufferings and the languors, the delights and the torments….”

“What you are about to read is more than just an update to The Story of O and more than a novel,
it is a true story. Vanessa’s story is touching; it might shock or disgust some: the truth about human
nature is never palatable when you have the courage to explore the dark side. Vanessa Duriès had
the guts and returned to tell us the story.”

Maxim Jakubowski

“What happens when a beautiful twenty-year-old virgin discovers S/M? In the case of Duries, an
autobiography of moving simplicity and tenderness is born. ‘Before me stood a young woman with
dark and curly hair, an intense hard look, and full lips like those of a child,’ she notes, as she appraises
herself in the mirror. But Duries is not the child she thinks she is, as she discovers in herself, under the
tutelage of her master, Pierre, an unusual capacity for pain. Duries was killed in a car accident shortly
after this book's publication. ‘Sadomasochism is an art, a philosophy, a cultural space prohibited to liars
and sworn hypocrites,’ Duries argues, and one wishes she had been given the time and occasion to unpack
that sentence. Part devotional lyric, part bildungsroman, part S/M primer for Generation Xers,
The Ties That Bind merits our attention.”

Marti Hohmann