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Michele Yogel devoured all 1,200- plus hot-andheavy pages of the “Fifty Shades” trilogy in less than two weeks.
“I couldn’t put it down,” admits Yogel, 33, who shooed away mom friends at her son’s school pickup because she didn’t want to be distracted from her reading.
“I’d be sitting on my couch at 7 a.m. with my two kids while they’re watching cartoons and drinking milk, and I’d be reading it on the Kindle app on my phone,” she says.
Which wouldn’t be a big deal —except for this Upper East Side mom was engrossed in a triple-X novel about a 27-year-old billionaire, Christian Grey, who seduces college grad Anastasia Steele and trains her to become his submissive sex slave.
“The last book I read was ‘The Help,’ ” says Yogel. “You know … normal, mainstream stuff.”
“Fifty Shades,” an erotica trilogy dubbed“mommy porn” by some, is rapidly becoming a cult hit among Manhattan women, who are exchanging well-worn paperback copies and excited whispers about the book’s “red room of pain” (a sex playroom) while meeting at Fred’s at Barneys or parent-teacher conference nights at school.
It’s like “Twilight” for the grown-up set. Except, you know, with lots of sex instead of vampires and abstinence.
Close your eyes, flip to a random page, point to a line and you’re basically guaranteed to land on a graphic, adjective-laden sex scene (often involving multiple props).
Unlike the florid descriptions found in your typical drugstore-variety bodice ripper, the details in “Fifty Shades” are reserved for the sex acts themselves: “Uncoiling from the floor, rising lazily, like a jungle cat, he points the end of the riding crop at my navel, leisurely circling it — tantalizing me. At the touch of the leather, I quiver and gasp.”
The descriptions get graphic—much more graphic — but they’re not printable here. (This is, after all, a family newspaper.)
“I found myself explaining what BDSM [bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism] was to some of the moms at Saturday morning basketball,” says power publicist Alison Brod, who hails “Fifty Shades” as “the new kabbalah for female bonding in this city.”
Allysa Goldman, 42, says, “Kids have never seen their mothers reading so much.”
Goldman, who lives in Closter, NJ, says the series has become such a phenomenon that her friends don’t even refer to the book by its title.
“It’s known as ‘The Book.’ Have you read ‘The Book?’ ” says Goldman, a mother of two.
“My girlfriends were all buying their husbands silver ties for Christmas,” she adds, referring to protagonist Grey’s favorite neckwear, which he uses in the book to restrain Steele in bed.
So why all the caught breaths? “It’s just a fun escape from the daily mundane of trudging kids around and, you know, marriage,” says a 40-year-old Upper East Side mother of three, who first heard about the book from her friends on Long Island.
“The person who recommended it to me said, ‘It will make you want to have sex with your husband.’ And it did!” says the mother, who asked not to be named.
Yogel agrees: “It’s revitalized everyone’s marriage on the Upper East Side, everyone’s sex life.”
So much so that the book, which is printed on demand, is selling out at city bookstores. (As of press time, the print version was sold out on Amazon.com as well, save for one paperback copy listed at a whopping $299.99 — the e-book, on the other hand, is still available for just $6.99.)
Indeed, most readers are happier delving into the sexual antics of Christian Grey via the anonymous shield of their e-readers. “In public places I feel like I’m doing something wrong; it makes me blush when I’m reading it,” says Dawn, a 27-year-old news producer who lives in the Financial District.
During a recent business trip back from DC, Dawn, who asked that her last name not be used, went to great lengths to make sure her reading material remained private.
After all, the book is not for the faint at heart.
“Every time I pick up this book, within five minutes of reading it, I’m already tingling below the belt,” she says.
“I was on the Acela and had this stuffy guy next tome. He must have been about 60. And I thought, ‘I can’t possibly read this with him here.’ But I couldn’t put it down. So I literally had [my phone] almost on a zero dim, and I turned to the side and prayed he wasn’t reading overmy shoulder.”
The underground word-of-mouth success of “Fifty Shades” is something most writers only dream of.
Especially for a first-time author like E L James, a 40-something British television executive based in West London.
In the fall of 2009, she was just another “obsessed” “Twilight” devotee posting BDSM-themed fan fiction online. (James had started reading BDSM fiction on a whim and found it to be “really, really hot.”)
Her posts gained a following, and a small Australian publishing house offered James, a mother of two teenage boys, a book deal.
The first book in the trilogy, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” debuted in May 2011. The second, “Fifty Shades Darker,” came out in September, and the final “Fifty Shades Freed,” was released last month.
“ ‘Fifty Shades’ is my midlife crisis,” James says with a throaty laugh by telephone from her home in England.
It wasn’t until this winter that the series cemented its Manhattan fan base.
“We started to see activity in early January,” says Patricia Bostelman, vice president of marketing at Barnes & Noble.
“It was a New Year’s surprise.”
Despite whispers of a movie deal and an impending pickup from a major US publishing house, James isn’t ready to be called the J.K. Rowling of erotic fiction just yet.
“I’m blown away by the popularity,” she says.
“I’m sort of gobsmacked by all of this. I wasn’t expecting any of this at all.”
To date, the trilogy has sold more than 100,000 copies (90 percent are e-books) and has recently landed James on the NewYork Times best-seller list.
And one thing is certain — it’s not selling like hot cakes because of the writing.
“The writing was a little lame,” admits Upper East Side mom Pam, who at the last minute asked to omit her last name because she didn’t “want my doormen knowing I read this book.”
Pam was turned onto the book by her sister-in-law from Roslyn, LI, over Thanksgiving.
“But I got into the story. I really became a cheerleader for their relationship,” she says.
The second and third books explore Grey and Steele’s deepening bond as they find true love outside the constraints of a BDSM contract, with a few plot points like an attempted kidnapping and lots of private-jet travel (don’t fret, the sex barely misses a beat).
“It’s not a masterpiece, but a mouthpiece for a generation,” says Sara Pilot, a 40-something Manhattan fashion stylist who first heard about “Fifty Shades,” which she likens to the movie “9 1/2 Weeks,” while on Christmas vacation on Anguilla, where “everyone was talking about it.”
Along with some flaws in the writing, devoted readers are ignoring an oddity of language (the book is set in Seattle, but British-isms keep seeping through) and James’ anachronistic tendencies. (Can we really believe that Steele doesn’t have a smartphone as a senior in college? Nor a laptop?)
“I didn’t think it was a great book as far as writing goes,” says a 47-year-old divorced man, whose female friend convinced him to read it despite his penchant for “Holocaust genre” literature.
“But it was a fun, enjoyable story … I enjoyed parts of it. The erotic parts. I found those to be interesting,” says the UES real-estate mogul, who asked to remain anonymous.
“That’s going to be the newest thing in real estate nowadays …a media room and a red room of pain,” he says with a laugh.
He’s not the only man looking to capitalize on the trilogy.
“A guy friend of mine said he wanted to form a business looking for girls who have ‘just finished the book, before they cool off,’ ” says Brod.
“Yeah, it totally makes you horny reading this. I think everyone has totally admitted to that,” concedes Pam.
But the 39-year-old mother’s not sharing her reading material with her hubby.
“I don’t think we’re having sex more or less than we were [because of “Fifty Shades”],” she says. “But I think if he read it, I’d be in trouble.”
dschuster@nypost.com