I was working as a bookseller when Fifty Shades of Grey was published and spent weeks stacking shelves with the glossy tomes, only for them to be whisked away as soon as they arrived. I soon amassed a range of excuses from customers who so often seemed to be embarrassed to be buying what everyone else was buying. “I’m getting it for my wife,” men announced, unprompted, while women – often younger than the label “mummy porn” suggested – would recount whole conversations with unnamed friends who had deemed the erotic thriller “quite good”.
The trilogy by EL James, the writing moniker of the British author Erika Leonard, was published between 2011 and 2012. Late last year it was announced that they had been the runaway bestselling books of the decade. In the UK alone, Fifty Shades of Grey sold 4.7m print copies, Fifty Shades Darker sold 3.3m and Fifty Shades Freed sold 3.1m. (The fourth biggest-selling book, Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals, sold 1.8m.) At its peak, two copies of the first book sold every second; for a time, the UK ran out of silver ink, thanks to its use on the books’ covers. Worldwide, by 2015, more than 150m copies had sold, with millions more ebooks on top. But alongside the huge number of copies sold, was there a lasting cultural influence?
The idea of smart cities is born of what Watson describes as “the same human superiority-complex that thinks nature should be controlled”. What’s missing is symbiosis. “Life on Earth is based upon symbiosis,” Watson says. She suggests we replace the saying “survival of the fittest” with “survival of the most symbiotic”. Not as catchy, perhaps. But smarter.
Little in “sanitized” adult American life, where Wood is productive and content, seems to have the same kind of purchase as those bygone places and people, that bygone music. He does not tell us — he does not need to — where those vivifying details can still be found (“the poplar, the lilac and the roses”). “To notice is to rescue, to redeem,” Wood writes. “To save life from itself.”
The enemies-to-lovers story is a classic, and How to Speak Boy honors that tradition with charm and humor.
Some days no one is my mother
but my mother. & my mother is no
longer a distance that cinches itself—
the flush on flush of the new