In December 2016, six months before publishing her addictively sexy novel The Idea of You, author Robinne Lee was in a “really terrifying” 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 “horrifying velocity,” sending her car skidding toward the woman on the street.
“I was sure I’d killed her,” Lee says. But “somehow, she stepped back at the right time, and we were all fine.”
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. “Women are so different,” he said, guessing that if three men had gotten into the same wreck, they’d be bickering.
The moment struck Lee, too. This would be a really good scene in a book, she thought later, imagining “lives coming together so violently and randomly. What if there was some kind of weird connection between these characters?”
A decade later, Lee’s 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, François, and their teens; and Anouk Ferrand, an enigmatic supermodel Cecilia first met on a photo shoot in Cabo San Lucas in the ’90s.
Crash Into Me is Lee’s long-awaited follow-up to The Idea of You, her escapist pandemic sensation about a 40-year-old gallerist’s 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 into a feature film for Amazon Studios starring Anne Hathaway.
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’s since been anointed the “patron saint of horny moms everywhere” and “the bard of high-class smut.” Where The Idea of You was layered with sharp societal commentary about a woman’s worth in an ageist culture, with Crash Into Me, Lee goes deeper—get your mind out of the gutter!—exploring race, identity, and the tumult of American politics in 2015/2016.
“It’s kind of like an evolution,” Lee says. “The worlds overlap, but this is slightly different.”
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’s block, the “tricky” process of writing sex scenes, and how she’d approach a screen adaptation of Crash Into Me.
Vogue: How are you feeling on the eve of putting Crash Into Me out in the world?
Robinne Lee: I’m good… I think. It’s weird. I’m excited. I’m anxious, but not as anxious as I could be. That’s because I’m on medication because I was getting really anxious.
I don’t 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?
There’s a lot of anxiety because of that. The Idea of You’s got a cult following. There are people who absolutely adore it. I wanted to make them happy. It was not easy. I had writer’s 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’s kind of like an evolution. The worlds overlap, but [Crash Into Me] is slightly different.
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