A NIGHT IN WITH E.L. JAMES, BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
A NIGHT
IN WITH E.L. JAMES, BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I recently paid a couple of quid for the privilege of
spending ‘a night in’ with billion-selling author and creator of the FIFTY
SHADES OF GREY book and film trilogy, E.L. James, real name Erika Mitchell.
In reality, this didn’t bestow an actual night with
the author on me; it only gave me access to an hour-long conversation between E.L.
James and former X FACTOR presenter Kate Thornton, but this was still really
enjoyable and entertaining and well worth the couple-a bucks I spent on it.
British writer E.L. James is the author I most admire. What
she managed to achieve was quite simply phenomenal. I first heard of her in 2012, when
suddenly everyone was talking about a book trilogy entitled FIFTY SHADES OF
GREY. This was the first book; the other two were entitled FIFTY SHADES
DARKER and FIFTY SHADES FREED.
I was bemused to see that all three books seemed to
materialise in the bookshops all at once. What gives, I wondered? Normally an
author releases a book, then a year later releases its sequel, and so forth.
The FIFTY SHADES books seemed to literally explode out of nowhere in a
complete, already fully-formed trilogy, and everybody was talking about them.
And they were doing more than just talking. They were buying the
books in their hundreds of thousands, making E.L. James the most successful
author in history and her books the fastest-selling since HARRY POTTER and
the Bible. In a publishing sense, the likes of the FIFTY SHADES trilogy
of books was in a class of its own. It turned the world of publishing on its
head.
There was this thing at the time where people, as well as
buying the physical books, would be downloading the story onto their kindles or
e-readers; that way they could read the scandalous ‘mummy porn’ anywhere they liked in public without
anyone else seeing what they were reading and judging them for reading filth, lol.
I didn’t mind being seen with my copies, which I bought
immediately the storm broke. And the chances were that, every time I walked
into a coffee shop carrying one or other of the books, there would be at least
one other woman already there with her nose in one of them as well. Talk about kinky
readers of the world unite…
The books are about sex, sadomasochism, BDSM and control in a
male-female relationship. The heroine, Anastasia Steele, is a beautiful young
American college student of literature who works in a hardware shop to make a
few quid on the side.
Almost by accident, she meets Seattle entrepreneur and
bazillionaire, twenty-seven-year-old Christian Grey, who, not to put too fine a
point on it, introduces her to his ‘Red Room of Pain’ and his BDSM lifestyle of
‘kinky fuckery,’ but Anastasia, as much as she loves him, is not at all
sure that she is cut out for this kind of shenanigans. Their relationship ups-and-downs
form the subject of the three books.
When I read them myself, I mentally howled and kicked myself
throughout. Why had I not written these books, or books like them, first? I
love sex, I love spanking, I love writing about dominant males and submissive
females! Why hadn’t I pipped E.L. James to the post?
Because she got there first, that’s why, and she actually sat
down and did the thing without just endlessly talking about doing it and
thinking about doing it, so fair play to her. She reaped the most fantastic
rewards, but then, she put the work in too, so she definitely deserved these
rewards.
She then re-wrote the three books, which started out as TWILIGHT
fan-fiction because E.L. James adored those books by Stephanie Meyer, from
the point of view of Christian Grey, whereas first they were all written from
Anastasia’s. That’s no mean feat, you know, as writing even one book takes
forever and puts years on you.
I’m sure there’s probably been FIFTY SHADES merchandise
over the years as well, lingerie, wine, chocolates, perfume, toiletries, bath
stuff, maybe even the requisite sweatshirts, T-shirts, baseball caps and
keychains, lol. It’s a multi-million selling franchise and it’s one that would
be really hard to out-do. We can of course try, but very few of us will ever
scale those dizzying heights, sad to say.
To those who bitchily bemoan the quality of the writing, I
say they’re jealous that they didn’t write these books themselves. I know I am!
To those who say that E.L. James inaccurately depicted BDSM practices and
tenets, I say I’m not qualified to comment on that, as I only like bits and
pieces of the lifestyle here and there and am not committed to it as a whole. I don't live it on a day-to-day basis.
To the folks who say that Anastasia’s relationship with
Christian is abusive, with him controlling her and running her life for her, I
say, hmmm, yes, maybe a tad. But then some women like that, don’t they, and
back then in 2012, ‘the year of the madness,’ as E.L. James puts it
herself, there were millions and millions of us who wanted to read about it too.
Films were even made of all three books, starring Dakota
Johnson and Jamie Dornan as Anastasia and Christian, and there weren’t too many
empty seats in the theatres where they were playing. I myself have the DVDs,
lol.
The books paved the way for millions- literally!- of authors of erotica to write and publish their books freely. Spanking, whipping and bondage in book-form suddenly became the hottest thing since sliced bread.
Were people ripping off FIFTY SHADES, or did
that many people genuinely have novels and novellas in them that they’d
heretofore been repressing out of fear, shame or embarrassment?
My own debut novel, THE DEVIANTS, which went up on
Amazon in 2014, was described by one reviewer as a bad FIFTY SHADES knock-off,
which I hotly dispute because it was a fictionalised account of a real life
relationship, so there, harrumph.
I did, however, begin writing my erotic Dracula fan-fiction in 2014, and I’ve been writing it on and off ever since, with no end currently in sight. I love writing it and get endless pleasure and enjoyment out of it, the way E.L. James says she loved writing her own books. You have to truly love your subject if you write that kind of thing…!
Erika Mitchell herself is an attractive, warm, dark-haired
woman of fifty-eight who laughs a lot, and especially at how mad the whole FIFTY
SHADES phenomenon was and still is. She was able to buy her gorgeous family
home on the dosh she made from the books, and she shares it with her screenwriter husband,
two sons and little doggie.
She seems like a really down-to-earth, good-humoured woman as
well as being the most best-selling author of all time, and, being the only
woman in a household of men, I’m sure she does her share of picking up dirty
socks and cleaning round the toilet bowl after the lads have mis-fired yet again.
Now that she’s finally finished the last book from the point
of view of Christian, she’s free- or FREED, haha- to work on the two or
three new projects she’s been mulling over for the last while.
I wish her the best of luck in anything she attempts, though
I hope her new books will be a little more exciting than J.K Rowling’s
non-Harry Potter books under her pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, miaow miaow.
Anyway, I loved my night in with E.L. James, although my own main
thoughts on the FIFTY SHADES books/films/phenomenon still are and
probably will always remain: ‘Why wasn’t it me? It should have been
meeeeeeeee…!’ You snooze, you lose…
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN
STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is
out now from Poolbeg Books:
Comments
Post a Comment