Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (3 page)

TIFFANY REISZ

H
ER LOVER one day takes O for a walk in a section of the city they never go …

This is the story. A woman, not young and physically unremarkable except in her stark plainness, writes a letter to the married man whom she loves. Not an ordinary love letter, it is instead a story, a fever dream put on paper, the story of a woman whose lover gives her over to another world where she is to be whipped and raped and possessed by others. Violent, brutal is the story she writes him, the story of a woman with only an initial O as her name. O for orifice? Or O for zero? Graphic and yet restrained, this letter is not pornography. It is far more dangerous than that. It is literature.

The letter isn’t sent out of love or perhaps not entirely out of love. The man to whom it is addressed is an editor of literature. And once he had said a woman couldn’t write an erotic novel. The woman, plain and not young, will try to prove him wrong. The letter is written in an odd style—third person but first person, present and past tense mingled … It is written in the
manner of a bedtime story told to children.
The girl meets a wolf on her walk through the forest and she is very afraid …
Or in the style of words whispered in the dark between lovers in the act.
It feels so good … I need this … I’m begging …
The prose has the aura of a dream to it, as if the writer is dictating something she’s seeing from a distance and yet experiencing at the same time.

Once sent, the letter proves her point—a woman can write an erotic book. But she miscalculated, wrote it far too well: her married lover thinks it should be published. She finishes it, though it is difficult for her. The plot meanders and the tortures of O increase. She finishes what she can and the book comes to a dark, abrupt ending as dreams often do—especially dreams of falling to one’s death and jerking awake.

The book is published under the pen name Pauline Réage. A furor erupts. Many women hate it and say a man who loathes women must have written it. Other women adore it as it speaks to a part of them no one has ever before addressed. Some women burn the book. Other women read the book and burn. And the author stays silent and admits nothing. The book is brave but the author reticent. Is it the content of the story that makes her hide her identify? Or is it that the recipient of the first letter is married and her lover? Although this is Paris, it is still 1954.

An erotic love letter never meant to be published for the masses—it is a story not unfamiliar to modern readers. Other women will follow in Réage’s footsteps. Often these women will be plain and unremarkable just as Réage was. Older, long past their sexual prime. Their beauty faded, if ever they were beauties at all, they will still have the longings of their youth. The world will see them merely as wives or mothers and not objects of sexual attention. They write, as Réage did, to prove someone wrong. A woman can write erotic fiction. A woman who is not beautiful can write something beautiful. A woman who is not the object of sexual desires is still shockingly sexual. A woman who is a wife or a mother or a nobody is, on paper, a goddess, a slut, a slave, a body to be taken and used for the pleasure of a
man. Réage writes her letter to her lover for the same reason the mistress of any married man attires herself like a prostitute or a princess. It is her way of saying, “I am not your wife. I am not an ordinary woman. I am so much more.”

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I
SCOWL WITH FRUSTRATION
at myself in the mirror …

This is the story. Another version of the story, true perhaps or perhaps not, perhaps merely another fever dream … another woman, not young or physically remarkable, a woman with two children, a husband, nothing to distinguish her in a crowd, finds herself unable to stop dreaming about a man twenty years her junior. A beautiful man who is adored by women the world over, he is utterly unattainable. They have nothing in common. They will never cross paths. If they do by accident or whim of fate, he will not notice her. At most he’ll sign his name on a scrap of paper for her, and she will already be forgotten by him before he’s taken two steps from her. She will never have him. But in her mind, she is twenty-one years old, not forty-seven. In her mind she has no children and no husband. She is, in fact, an untouched virgin, untouched even by her own hands. And the man is someone else. He has the same face, the same eyes, the same body she dreams of, but he is a darker version of himself. The real man leads a tame life and is devoted to one woman. The man she desires is damaged and distant. He has desires that inflame and terrify her. She wants him to be broken so she can heal him. She wants him to be lost so she can save him.

And so she begins to write. Unlike Réage, who wrote in pencil in school exercise books in the dark, this woman writes on a BlackBerry during her commute. She has children and must steal the time from her everyday life to lose herself in this fantasy that will never come true. It is a child’s fantasy—a girl with nothing special about her except her incredible ordinariness captures the heart of a beautiful man flush with wealth and
power. Like Réage’s, her story isn’t written to be published for profit. It’s put online, given away to others who, like her, love the same Unattainable. An editor finds the book, changes it, publishes it. The ordinary wife and mother has, without trying, become an author, garnered an audience, fame, millions of dollars, and the adoration of legions. Some women burn the book. Other women read it and burn.

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T
HIS IS THE STORY
.

M. CHRISTIAN

E
XCUSE THE HYPERBOLE, but there really are moments when everything just … changes: the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, the personal computer. It would just be nice that the paradigm shift in literature and publishing would have been better written.

To be polite—at best—
Fifty Shades of Grey
has been called … well, let’s let Margot Sage-EL, co-owner of the Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey, say it: “Our customers are very smart and they say it’s badly written, but they are in the middle of book three.”

As with anything hugely popular, the trilogy has received just about an equal amount of scorn to match its sales. Even Susan Donaldson James called it “a cheese-ball narrative whose heroine is incapable of using adult language. She refers to her genitals euphemistically as
my sex
.” But popular
Fifty Shades
is—to a staggering degree: in March it reached the number-one spot on the national e-book fiction bestseller list. Naturally there’s going to be a film.

Putting aside the mumbles and grumbles from the legions of hardworking, and unarguably more talented, erotica writers out there (
ahem
… M.Christian …
ahem
),
Fifty Shades
will, no doubt, be remembered as when
everything changed
.

Okay, it may not be as big as the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, or the personal computer, but it’s still a total and complete game changer. For one thing, it’s pretty much the final nail in the old-school world of print publishing. Sure, that model has been gasping and wheezing for a few years now but for a teeny-tiny—and badly written—little book to do what New York dreamt of doing shows once and for all that they need to burn down their old ways and finally begin to embrace the lean, mean, and cutting-edge world of e-books.

It’s also the final shovel of dirt on another corpse: the concept of old-school marketing.
Fifty Shades of Grey
didn’t succeed because of its brilliant prose, its immense advertising budget, or inspired publicity: it scored that coveted number-one spot because “mom” E. L. James jumped right in, feetfirst, to social networking and viral marketing with a dogged persistence that’s, frankly, a bit scary. The only bad side of this is—sigh—that for the next five to ten years we’re gonna be bombarded not just with
Fifty Shades
knock-offs but all those authors trying the same tricks James did.

Still, while a lot of them won’t succeed,
Fifty Shades
has proven that it’s time to bury what doesn’t work—like dead tree book printing—and try to really, completely rethink marketing and publicity.

The bottom line is that the Fifty Shades trilogy is pure, unadulterated smut.

Porn? PORN?! The mind boggles! Sure, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the world of advertising and marketing was due for a major overhaul, and only people with some serious stock holdings in paper were holding onto the fantasy that print books weren’t dead, but no one could have seen that the book that would prove both would also haul
our beloved pornography out of the shadows and into the mainstream—and on to the
New York Times
bestseller list as well.

So while
Fifty Shades
may have shaken things up a bit, take heart in that, while a lot of old traditions are tumbling down, its success means that authors—especially erotica writers—may finally get to remind the world that there’s no gray area when it comes to popularity … and money.