Fifty Shades of Grey author shocked by book’s popularity
Halfway through a two-week tour to promote Fifty Shades of Grey, British author E.L. James is 50 shades of shell-shocked about the supercharged success of her erotic trilogy.
“It’s really exhausting, and I find all the hoopla around it extraordinary,” the 40-something married mother of two teenage boys says in an interview. “But it’s great to meet people who really love the books, just to say thanks, if nothing else, and just exchange a few words. I really enjoy that.”
Despite all the fan enthusiasm, James (whose real name is Erika Leonard) says the depth of her new-found fame and fortune hasn’t sunk in.
“It’s very strange,” she says, brushing her brunette bangs off her forehead. “It’s just that everything has happened so quickly. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. They’ve just been shipping out books like nobody’s business.”
And that’s no overstatement. The erotic novels, about a virginal college student named Anastasia who enters a submissive sexual relationship with Christian Grey, a handsome young billionaire, were first published by a small Australian publisher last May, largely as e-books. They became such hot properties — dubbed “mommy porn” by some wags — that Vintage, a division of Random House, bought the rights.
In April, Vintage’s paperback editions began selling here. In less than a month, Vintage has sold three million copies (digital and print) of the trilogy. Fifty Shades of Grey, first in the series, is No. 1 on USA Today’s Best-selling Books list, a spot it’s held for two weeks. They are bestsellers in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and nearly three dozen other countries will be selling them in translation soon. All the attention, James says, is sometimes overwhelming.
“In New Haven (Conn.), I went into a room and there were about 1,000 women in there, and they all started applauding, and I started to cry. The response has been so extraordinary, so no, I’m not used to it yet. Part of me loves it, but I’d rather be at home writing.”
James, a former BBC production executive, is beginning to understand what people like about the books.
“It’s a combination of things. Fundamentally, people like a good love story. That’s it,” she says. “They like the sex as well. They love Christian Grey, a complicated, damaged, talented man. He’s very capable and strong and domineering but broken. So he’s a fixerupper. I mean, it’s a fantasy — the whole book — and so they bought into it and suspended their disbelief. Gone on a vacation really.”
And how James came to write her famous erotic trilogy is equally fantastic. After reading Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, James began writing fan fiction about Edward and Bella, the Twilight protagonists. But it was far less chaste than anything Meyer ever wrote. “It was very sexy,” James says, and the story of Christian and Anastasia is basically that fan fiction. “I had to tone it down and alter certain bits of it for publication, but fundamentally, it’s the same sort of story.”
Fever-pitch excitement for the novels heated up more after Universal and Focus Features bought the movie rights. As for who she thinks would be the perfect onscreen Christian and Anastasia, James will say only, “I’m keeping very quiet about all of that.”
She’s also deflecting questions about whether she and her husband have experience with domination — “I’ve a little bit of experience, but I think that’s mostly between me and my husband” — and says most of her research for the books was done on the Internet, “but also just thinking things through in my head.”.