In December 2016, six months before publishing her addictively sexy novel The Idea of You, author Robinne Lee was in a \u201creally terrifying\u201d car accident in Los Angeles. While waiting to park outside her favorite coffee shop on Montana Avenue, in a spot soon to be vacated by a woman juggling her purse and coffee, Lee was rear-ended with \u201chorrifying velocity,\u201d sending her car skidding toward the woman on the street.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was sure I\u2019d killed her,\u201d Lee says. But \u201csomehow, she stepped back at the right time, and we were all fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the aftermath, as Lee and the other two drivers hugged and comforted each other, a bond forged between them. One of their husbands looked on, smiling. \u201cWomen are so different,\u201d he said, guessing that if three men had gotten into the same wreck, they\u2019d be bickering.<\/p>\n
The moment struck Lee, too. This would be a really good scene in a book, she thought later, imagining \u201clives coming together so violently and randomly. What if there was some kind of weird connection between these characters?\u201d<\/p>\n
A decade later, Lee\u2019s sultry sophomore novel, the aptly titled Crash Into Me, begins with a similar accident on Montana, and the tenuous intimacy established between two of its survivors: Cecilia Chen, a Jamaican-Chinese photographer relocating to Los Angeles from Paris with her director husband, Fran\u00e7ois, and their teens; and Anouk Ferrand, an enigmatic supermodel Cecilia first met on a photo shoot in Cabo San Lucas in the \u201990s.<\/p>\n
Crash Into Me is Lee\u2019s long-awaited follow-up to The Idea of You<\/a>, her escapist pandemic sensation about a 40-year-old gallerist\u2019s affair with a 20-year-old British boy bander that has since sold a million copies, been translated into two dozen languages, and been adapted<\/a> into a feature film for Amazon Studios starring Anne Hathaway.<\/p>\n Crash Into Me shares DNA with the earlier book, and not only because Cecilia first appeared there as a minor character. The new novel also has all the exotic jaunts and hot sex that earned Lee her obsessive fanbase; she\u2019s since been anointed the \u201cpatron saint of horny moms everywhere\u201d<\/a> and \u201cthe bard of high-class smut.\u201d<\/a> Where The Idea of You was layered with sharp societal commentary about a woman\u2019s worth in an ageist culture, with Crash Into Me, Lee goes deeper\u2014get your mind out of the gutter!\u2014exploring race, identity, and the tumult of American politics in 2015\/2016.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like an evolution,\u201d Lee says. \u201cThe worlds overlap, but this is slightly different.\u201d<\/p>\n In a recent Zoom interview from Paris, where she moved from LA in 2022, Lee told Vogue about how the wild success of The Idea of You contributed to years of writer\u2019s block, the \u201ctricky\u201d process of writing sex scenes, and how she\u2019d approach a screen adaptation of Crash Into Me.<\/p>\n Vogue: How are you feeling on the eve of putting Crash Into Me out in the world?<\/p>\n Robinne Lee: I\u2019m good… I think. It\u2019s weird. I\u2019m excited. I\u2019m anxious, but not as anxious as I could be. That\u2019s because I\u2019m on medication because I was getting really anxious.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if this is the source of your anxiety, but I wonder how the success of The Idea of You impacted you as a writer. Was it a head trip?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of anxiety because of that. The Idea of You\u2019s got a cult following. There are people who absolutely adore it. I wanted to make them happy. It was not easy. I had writer\u2019s block for three years and then when I figured out what I was going to do, it took five years to do it and maybe 22 months of editing. It\u2019s kind of like an evolution. The worlds overlap, but [Crash Into Me] is slightly different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In December 2016, six months before publishing her addictively sexy novel The Idea of You, author Robinne Lee…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":532136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[412,146,85,46,10351,5101],"class_list":["post-532135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/532136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}