According to the website celebritynetworth.com, E L James, author of the bestselling kinkfest Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, earns about $1m a week. I've no idea if this is true – and naturally, she's not going to confirm it to me. But even if the figures are way off, and she's making only half this, it's still an extraordinary sum.
So what, I wonder, does she spend it on? James (real name Erika Leonard), a giggly, slightly rock-chickish 48-year-old with a pair of reading glasses stuck unthreateningly on top of her head, puts down her fork and thinks for a moment.
"Well, last week I finally got a new pair of Uggs," she says. Uggs? "Yes. I'd been putting it off, you see." Why? She could afford a thousand pairs of Uggs if that was what she fancied. "Yes, but I'm more conscious of money now than before. I've had the odd moment when I've thought: I could buy that. But I've always decided not to, in the end. It's just stuff, really, and I've got enough stuff."
So her sudden good fortune hasn't turned her head? "No. I'm too old for that. Having worked in TV production all my life [her last job, which she left in January, was at Vic and Bob's company, Pett], I'm very aware of how monsters are created, and I don't want to be one. It's unsettling, yes. I do feel like I'm in a dream. But it's just noise – or that's how I think of it. One minute, you're in Madrid [doing publicity], drinking cosmopolitans, the next you're in Ikea, eating meatballs and chips." Ikea? Isn't she pestered in Ikea? "No. That's why I don't do much press. I value my anonymity. I'm happy to come in on the tube or the train and watch other people reading Fifty Shades." I glance furtively round the cafe where we're having lunch. Clearly her plan is working. Not a single person seems to have clocked her.
The story of how Fifty Shades was born has passed into myth by now. But in case you've been in Outer Mongolia – actually, that line doesn't work because according to her publicist, the books have been translated into Mongolian – it began its life as Twilight-inspired, internet-published fan fiction which she wrote using the name Snowqueens Icedragon. "Yes, I'm a Twi-hard," she says, ecstatically, pressing her palm to her heart. Her erotic Twilight story gave her the idea for a novel, at which point, she found that she could think of nothing else. "I became obsessed," she says. "Absolutely obsessed. I didn't watch television, I didn't go to the cinema. My friends would ring and say: what are you doing? And I would say: I've just got to finish this chapter." In 2011, less than a year after she'd begun it, she published the book online – at which point something strange happened.
Over a period of weeks, it went viral. In the US, women went completely demented for it. Suddenly, big publishers and agents, none of whom would touch fan fiction before, were desperate to meet her. By the time she signed a deal with Random House last March, there was no need for a marketing campaign: Fifty Shades was already America's number one ebook, and a bidding war was underway for the film rights. It has since sold 60 million copies in English alone. Last week, America's book trade bible, Publishers Weekly, named her its "publishing person of the year", an accolade that puts her with Jeff Bezos of Amazon when it comes to her influence on the industry (cue the headline "Civilisation ends" in one New York newspaper).
I have to ask: where on earth did the sex come from? (The novels tell the story of a young virgin, Anastasia Steele, and how she falls in love with a "very attractive" billionaire CEO, Christian Grey, who is big into nipple clamps and floggers, has a "red room of pain", and makes her sign a weird contract in which she agrees to make full and regular use of her local beauty salon.) "Well, I'd read a few things about BDSM [bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism], and I thought: this is hot!" she says, chirpily. "I thought: what would it be like if you met someone who was into this kind of lifestyle, and you didn't know anything about it?" And did writing about this lifestyle, er, turn her on? "Well, sometimes. But mostly, no. It's all about mechanics: whose hand goes where? I'd phone my husband [Niall Leonard, a screenwriter], who has an office in our back garden, and we'd lie there, fully clothed, just working out the choreography. It was hilarious!"
The reaction from readers has, she says, been incredible. "All a writer wants is to be read, and people are so flattering and lovely. I mean, there are witches out there as well. But most are so kind." Not only do they bring jars of her favourite food, Nutella, to her readings (one even brought her a specially engraved spoon, the better that she might eat hers straight from the pot); some tell her that she has changed their lives. "I get a lot of emails. Most of them say: 'Thank you, I've fallen in love with Christian Grey, and my husband thanks you too.' Which is code for: way-haa-aay! But I also get very moving ones. I'll give you an example. 'I was sexually abused as a child, and I've never enjoyed sex, but your books have liberated me.' Another woman wrote to me and said: 'We were trying to do the nipple orgasm thing …' " She breaks off. "Whoah! Too much information." She returns to the story. " '... and my husband found a lump on my breast. I've since had a full mastectomy. I've got a three-year-old son. Thank you.' I sit there in tears. In fact, I'm going to cry now just thinking about it." I'm afraid she's right: her eyes are all watery, and the tip of her nose has gone pink.
Some publishers – and my hairdresser – are convinced that people who don't usually read at all have tried E L James. Is this true? She thinks it is. "Some write and say that, until they found Fifty, they hadn't read a book for ten, 15, even 28 years." But what is it that they like so much? She thinks it's the romance rather than the sex. "The love story is so much more important than the sex. The sex is interesting but loads of books have sex in, some of them quite graphic sex. You want to know: what is going to happen to these two people? Will she break him down in the end? Because, of course, she's far stronger than he is." She laughs, slightly hysterically. "This is going to sound weird, but I'm re-reading Fifty at the moment – I'm preparing for a meeting about the film script – and I can't put it down. It's a real page-turner!" Crikey. Is she very involved in the film, which will be made by the producers of The Social Network? "Yes, I am. I'm a bit of a control freak. Christian gets it from somewhere, you know."
Sudden success can sometimes twist a life completely out of shape. But this clearly hasn't happened to James. I can't remember the last time I interviewed someone so uncomplicatedly pleased with their good fortune – and apparently, this goes for the rest of the family, too. In a recent interview, her husband seemed rather snippy. But she insists not. "What can I say? He's still the same grumpy bastard he was when I met him. But he's so proud of me, it's unbelievable." Her teenage sons, who haven't read the book, tease her often, which is jolly; her mother, though distressed to find that Christian and Anastasia never seem to shower after sex, is delighted; even her father-in-law likes the book.
It does take the breath away when James tells you proudly that one book took only four months to write, as if speed were a reliable indicator of writerly prowess. But then, this is all of a piece with her slightly bewildering naivety. Will she be publishing another book soon? "I hope so," she says, quietly. "I'm re-writing the first novel I ever wrote at the moment. But maybe it won't happen again. We'll see." It seems not to occur to her that, right now, her publisher would probably pay good money for her shopping list.
