Late one night, while her husband was away and her children were asleep, the writer Robinne Lee came across something that would change the course of her life. The US author, who now lives in Paris, found herself watching a particular boyband on YouTube – she refuses to name which – and felt attracted to one of them. When her husband came back from his business trip, she told him: “I found this perfect guy. I’m going to run off and follow him and his band around the world.” He laughed and said: “You’re crazy. But that would make a really good story.”
He was right. This really good story became Lee’s debut novel, The Idea of You, which snowballed into a lockdown hit, attracting legions of obsessed fans around the world via word-of-mouth recommendations. Now, the story of Solène Marchand, a sophisticated US divorcee on the cusp of 40, and Hayes Campbell, her 21-year-old British pop star boyfriend, has been turned into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine.
Lee was born and raised in Westchester County, New York, and attended Yale and Columbia Law School. Then she spent two decades working as an actor in Hollywood before she wrote The Idea of You. “When I was turning 40, I noticed all my roles were changing suddenly. The roles I was being considered for were all staid characters: moms, lawyers, doctors. And there were far fewer of them around.”
Earlier in her career, Lee had taken much more glamorous parts: a sired vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Will Smith’s fiancee in Seven Pounds. “I realised that Hollywood no longer wanted me as a women of a certain age. The descriptions would always say something like, ‘Tracy, 40, once beautiful but has seen better days’ or ‘attractive once, now tired’.”
Lee started wondering what planet the scriptwriters were on. “Do they think women just shrivel up and become ogres at 40? I knew my husband and I were having a pretty active sex life, and my friends all were. And I thought, ‘What is it about Hollywood and our culture that they shut off and discredit women after a certain age as not being valuable or desirable?’”
This, she says, is what drove her to create Solène, a mother who runs an art gallery, and Hayes, a much younger man who finds her extremely desirable. “They hook up in random cities, depending on her schedule, or his band August Moon’s, and it becomes more of a genuine love story than something casual and subversive.”
As a teenager Lee was obsessed with Duran Duran, and fantasised about “how amazing it would be” to date one of them. But when, professionally, she actually got to know a member of New Kids on the Block, she realised it was “not a life I would ever want. All that attention and screaming is exciting for a few minutes. Then it very quickly becomes something oppressive, isolating and inescapable.” Gradually, in book and film, Solène’s dreamy love life turns into a living nightmare. “It’s not a typical love story,” Lee adds. “It’s darker, more serious.”
Although published in 2017, the book didn’t really take off until Covid: Lee thinks it offered escapism and wish fulfilment to readers stuck at home. Solène and Hayes have what the author Curtis Sittenfeld described as “scorching hot” sex in glittering locations all over the globe. “I think I had a captive audience,” Lee says. “The idea that you could travel vicariously through this woman’s experiences was appealing.”
To write the sex scenes, she drew on her time as a student of psychology at Yale. “I’d read all these books on human psychology and sexuality, with first-person stories of people’s sexual experiences. So it was a combination of honesty and train of thought. Because when you’re having sex, you’re into it – but sometimes you get pulled out of it. You think about walking the dog or getting the groceries. You’ve got your own thoughts. If you remember that, it keeps it real.”
Lee also ensured that each sex scene brought the characters closer together. “I had this rule that I wasn’t going to make them naked on the page unless they were naked emotionally. So in every sex scene, he reveals something of himself to her or she to him – or something of herself to herself.”
At first, Lee had to steel herself with a stiff drink, make sure she was completely alone, and dim the lights before she began a sex scene. “I wrote the book pretty much chronologically, and the first few sex scenes were very much like having sex with someone new. It was like there were three of us naked in the room.” But by the end of the book, she could write them in Starbucks. “People near me had no idea what I was doing.”
Shortly after Lee finished writing her book, she met Erika Mitchell, AKA the Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James, after taking the role of Christian Grey’s trusted COO Ros Bailey in the Fifty Shades films. “I got to know Erika and that was a treat. She was someone who’d been through everything I was about to go through, but far more extreme. And she was really good at giving me advice. She was like, ‘Have you done this? Are you on Goodreads? Do you communicate with your fans?’ She was wonderful.”
At first, when The Idea of You started to get noticed, Lee felt a “lot of anxiety” about the sex scenes and the age gap between the characters. “I thought, ‘Everybody’s going to judge me now. Everyone’s going to think I personally have this desire to run off with a 20-year-old guy in a boy band.’ I remember being terrified about what the parents at my kids’ school would think.”
The novel particularly appealed to fans of former One Direction singer-songwriter Harry Styles, who has famously dated older women. The phrase “one direction” is scattered throughout the text, and the resemblance between Galitzine and Styles is striking, right down to their earrings, music videos and tattoos.
But when I ask Lee to what extent Hayes is based on Styles, she says: “Very little.” While the British star “definitely had an appeal”, he is merely one of 23 people who inspired Hayes, a list that included her husband – film producer Eric Hayes – as well as Duran Duran, Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston. “I’ve always been taken with all things British,” she says. “I wanted to do a posh boy band, as if Prince Harry and his friends from Eton had formed one.”
Lee’s favourite scene in the film is the one in which Hathaway walks into an upmarket New York hotel to have sex with Galitzine for the first time, wearing a raincoat over a very revealing dress. “She knows what she’s going to do.” And when the author watched the 41-year-old actor playing her character, she felt tears welling up. “Not just for Solène, for making this choice to go out and have some fun, but also for Anne Hathaway, for being like, ‘Screw everyone who says I can’t be sexy. Watch what I’m going to do.’”
• The Idea of You is on Prime Video from 2 May
