Soon broadsheet newspapers were publishing articles entitled ‘Why Does Fifty Shades of Grey Turn British Women On?’ and various academics were wheeled out to talk earnestly about how Erika (under the pen name E L James) had made it permissible for women to indulge their sexual imaginations without shame.īy August 2012, the book was more popular than The Highway Code, shifting 5.3 million copies in its first year and becoming the UK’s fastest-selling paperback of all time. It struck a chord with women around the world, many of whom took advantage of the new ebook reader trend to lose themselves in breathless renditions of kinky sex without anyone on the morning commute being any the wiser. I thought, “Is this it?” and I suddenly found this passion.’įifty Shades was originally self-published. ‘And I was slogging away working in telly. ‘I got to the stage where I had two teenage boys and a husband who were just doing their own things,’ she says now. She was working three days a week in TV production at the time but, disillusioned with her day job, she decided to pour all her fantasies on to the keyboard. It began as Twilight fan fiction – Erika had loved the teen vampire movies so much that she had taken to her laptop to bash out erotic encounters with fictional characters and she soon discovered that she had a talent for it. It was the final instalment in an erotic fiction trilogy that had started with Fifty Shades of Grey, which became a literary sensation when it was published in 2011. That book, complete with sex scene in the leather-upholstered front of an Audi R8, was Fifty Shades Freed. There’s enough room.” Then I went back and rewrote it.’ A few days later, she went to the West London Audi garage in person, ‘and there was a beautiful black R8 on display and I said, “Can I just get in the car?” So I sat in it and said, “You could totally have sex in here. So Erika took matters into her own hands. She tried removing the sex scene between her protagonist Christian Grey and his romantic conquest Anastasia Steele that took place in his glossy black Audi R8. OK.”’ Steve SchofieldĬuriosity sated, Erika put down the phone and returned to her laptop in her West London study. No, you can’t do that.” And I thought, “Oh. ‘I said, “Could you have sex in the front of an Audi R8?” Because I’d never been in one. She introduced herself as a romantic novelist to the man in sales and said she needed to know the answer to a particularly urgent question. Instead, she had a specific purpose in mind. She was not in the market for a new vehicle. Elizabeth Day meets the queen of the sex scene.Īfew years ago, Erika Leonard called up her local car dealership.
The Fifty Shades trilogy made its author E L James a multimillionaire – and inspired British women to rediscover their sexuality.
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