Free Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey by Lori Perkins Page A

couch. But the cleavage-heaving greats would still have to agree E. L. has chops and craft, and holds her readers as the tension mounts …
    •     •     •     •     •
    So what if feminists decry the erotic lure of the powerful male over the vulnerable heroine thing? So what if you tend to nod off while waiting for the next sexually charged scene to get pulsing? So what if the book editors seem to have tossed aside their red felt pens and reached for their vibrators?
Fifty Shades
“gives new meaning to reading for pleasure,” crows Vintage, an imprint of Random House, the publisher of E. L. James—as well as Flaubert.
    Somewhere … in a bookstore, not far from you …
    Madame Bovary just rolled her eyes.

    KATHARINE SANDS is a literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency in New York City. Katharine represents a varied list of authors who publish a diverse array of books. She is “the agent provocateur” of
Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye
, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents, and has written for
Writer’s Digest, The Writer Magazine, Publishers Weekly
, and the
New York Times
.
    For Katharine, watching ideas turn into books is magical—as if elves make them. Highlights include
XTC: Song-Stories
;
Mom’s Choice; Hands off My Belly: The Pregnant Woman’s Guide to Surviving Myths, Mothers and Moods
;
The Unofficial Guide to House, MD
;
Dating the Devil
by Lia Romeo;
The New Rules of Attraction
by Arden Leigh;
Make Up, Don’t Break Up
with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil;
Writers on Directors
;
Taxpertise
;
Under the Hula Moon
;
The Complete Book on International Adoption: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Child
; Ford model Helen Lee’s
The Tao of Beauty
;
Elvis and You: Your Guide to the Pleasures of Being an Elvis Fan
;
New York: Songs of the City
; and
SAT Word Slam
, to name a few.

HOPE TARR, PHD

Because Love Hurts
    We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love
.
    —S IGMUND F REUD
    A LL LOVE HURTS. At one point or another, it just does. How could an emotion so exquisite, so transporting, so complex and utterly consuming not be balanced by a shadow side?
    The newly in-love are especially vulnerable, uniquely at risk. Be we sixteen or sixty, it is in forging the dark, unknown, and sometimes dangerous terrain of a new love that we are at our most blind and, yes, our most vulnerable. And yet arguably what makes new love so titillating, so entirely thrilling, so obsessively captivating is its very uncertainty, its implicit and, in the case of
Fifty Shades of Grey, explicit
danger. Will s/he hurt me? Isthis going to work out? Can I possibly be …
enough
, whatever enough may mean?
    Regardless of our sexual appetites, our kink, our desires in and out of the bedroom, when we’re newly in love, we flog ourselves with feelings, excoriate ourselves with doubts. We may appear flawless and totally together on the outside but on the inside … we are raw, we are
bleeding
. What E. L. James accomplishes in
Fifty Shades of Grey
is to invite us inside a world where those inner hurts can be manifested in a very real, very tangible, very sexy way: BDSM.
    In
Fifty Shades of Grey
, mega-mogul Christian Grey offers the young heroine, Ana Steele, an “indecent proposal” in the form of a three-month contract wherein she will be his submissive, his sex slave, and he her Dominant and tutor. Much later in the book (chapter 22), Ana eloquently expresses her internal conflict about their proposed arrangement to Christian.
    “What you are offering is erotic and sexy, and I’m curious, but I’m also scared you’ll hurt me—physically and emotionally. After three months you could say good-bye, and where will that leave me if you do? But then I suppose that risk is there in any relationship.”
    Yes, I suppose it is.
    Love without some risk is