More than 165 million copies of the trilogy sold, then there were the movies and “Fifty Shades”: the branded empire.īut even the wildest successes can’t always protect you.Ī month or so before her medical scare, James’ beloved publicist at Penguin Random House, Russell Perreault, died.
The former television executive surpassed her modest hope for that first book, which famously started as “Twilight” fan fiction, featuring the controversially volatile relationship between Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. “I wonder, was it the stress? Was everything catching up to me? These books have been tremendously successful far beyond what I would have predicted,” James says. James laughs: she is well aware of the irony.īut there is another more likely culprit. Exposure to extremely cold water has been known to trigger brief episodes of amnesia and so can very vigorous sexual intercourse. She was later diagnosed with transient global amnesia, which she explains is a fancy way to say doctors don’t know what caused the episode.
Not only was that scary, she couldn’t even use it as writing fodder. James quickly regained most of her short-term memory, but she still can’t remember that lost day. She thought David Cameron was still the British prime minister (he left in 2016) and couldn’t believe her husband when he told her that Boris Johnson had been voted into power. She believed it was 2012, the year after “Fifty Shades” became one of the biggest cultural touchstones of the decade, sparking complicated discussions in the mainstream about S&M and consent. It all sounds like a TV plot, but when James woke up seven years of her memory had just vanished.
Over Zoom from her west London home office, she takes me back to that day in September 2019, though she doesn’t recall the ambulance ride or arriving at the hospital. The last thing James remembers is ringing her husband, who was out walking the dogs. E L James fans who have been impatiently waiting for the final book in the two “Fifty Shades” trilogies - they’ve sent the popular writer photos pointing out the empty spaces on their shelves reserved for it - are about to be “Freed.” As it turns out, writing that final book, travelling back to 2011 and into Christian’s and Ana’s lives became a salve for James, too, freeing her from a dramatic episode that has changed her life.Įrika Leonard, or E L James as she’s best known around the world, was at her family’s beach house in Cornwall, England, working on the sixth and final book in the “Fifty Shades” series, “Freed: Fifty Shades as Told by Christian,” when suddenly she felt out of sorts.
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