James' Bondage

The shy British mum whose naughty book set U.S. hearts afire

Gillian Laub for TIME

Readers on New York's Long Island celebrate a book critics are calling mommy porn

Sex after marriage, the old saying goes, has three phases: kitchen, bedroom and hallway. Kitchen sex is the spontaneous type spouses have when they first get together. Bedroom sex is the more routine lovemaking that sets in after a few years. And hallway sex is when husband and wife pass each other in the hallway and say, "Screw you."

Recently, however, the press has been touting a fourth kind: the sex that hallway-phase couples start having after the wife reads novels by E.L. James, a virtual unknown--even in the wildly lucrative but disdained romance genre. Until recently James was posting her...

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