I feel like I become a nervous fifth grader when I go to interview someone on Zoom. I’d much rather chat it out with someone over coffee than wait my turn as maybe the 4th spot of 7 people who get to ask a question in a press round table through my screen. Will the questions I develop get asked by people before me? Will I have enough time to ask everything I want to know? But this isn’t how the world works. The other day I had about two minutes to ask Robinne Lee anything I wanted to about her book “The Idea of You” and it comes out on Prime Movie (today) May 2 as a movie and once I left the interview I realized I wish I’d asked her so much more. Have you ever felt like this?
Listening to the questions before me, I learn that the book “Idea of You” was actually written nearly 10 years ago. It’s a fictional romance between a 40 year old woman and a 20 year old member of a world famous boy band. And Robinne Lee’s actual husband is the one who encouraged her to write this book. (His real life last name by the way is Hayes) When I first heard about this book I wasn’t drawn to it-it’s not my usual type of book: very romantic and with teenage boys of my own, 20 years old doesn’t seem too far off from where they are and I think this helps make this idea actually terrify me at this moment in time. But it’s also intriguing. I meant to ask why she made Hayes 20 and not 21. (The movie actually makes the age pairing 39 and 24.) Someone else asked Robinne about how she came up with the title and we learn that the working title was “Unfolded” but she ultimately changed the name because of a line in the book: “maybe it’s not you, maybe it’s the Idea of you.” We so rarely hear of women dating younger men even though it’s been such a norm for men to date younger women. Even today I read a headline about Christian Slater, an actor we had on posters on our walls in the 90’s, because he’s expecting a second child with his wife, someone he met when he was a similar age to Solene in Robinne’s novel and his wife was the same age as Hayes. The age part I probably wouldn’t have noticed before-it’s been on my mind since reading this book this week and it made me wonder what else I might not be noticing too.
After I started reading this book I could barely put it down.
Rather, I tried to devour it like I used to be able to do with books in my 20s back in university. I thought I could pull an all-nighter before the early morning interview but I forgot I’m a 40ish-year-old mom who drives her kids to schools across the city within a span of 2 hours in the morning except this morning I’d try to squeeze the interview within the 30ish minutes I grab coffee and make breakfast for one of my kids. I forgot how much we women juggle our lives to make everything fit and how there is so much of us mirrored in the character of Solene. And I have to admit I still had about 50 pages left to read when the interview commenced.
I was really intrigued by the dialogue between Solene and her friend Elora as they talked about aging in this book. Elora says: “I want to evolve because I evolve. I don’t want other people to choose when that happens for me”. She goes on to say “if your value is tied up in your looks and how the world responds to your physical appearance what do you do when that changes?” This spoke to me so much with everything I’ve been though with my autoimmune disease this past year as well as just being a mom in her forties with teenage boys. Who am I really now? How do I define myself even as others are defining me. Can I still evolve the way I want to or does this end when we are twenty?
When I asked Robinne about this conversation between Solene and Elora, she said “I wanted to be very honest and reflective of everything I was going through in my forties and feeling like I was running out of time….what happens now? We have so much on us as women anyway….there’s a lot..I kind of wanted to give voice to that and explore that..and let women know that we’re all going through it, we’re all in it, at different ways at different stages….” And I can’t imagine a more honest or beautiful reason to read this book. (you can see my interview with Robinne here-I was able to upload part of our interview on my instagram)
And what I also wish is that I asked Robinne about is also all the art in the book. I am really into art lately and I love stories that tie in real places and real things so I checked out Robinne Lee’s instagram before the interview to learn a little more and saw that one of the artists is her cousin and has an art gallery that just opened. So this made me want to google all the art in the book to find out more about these pieces too, she includes quite a few works in this book.
And if you also loved the book, you might want to know that Robinne is coming out with another novel too-she just finished the draft! I wonder if it will be anything like this one or if it will go in a completely different direction. I also literally just got back from watching the preview of Idea of You at a screening in our local theatre, it comes out on Prime Video tomorrow and I was surprised at how it changed the story more than I thought it would. (Robinne said in our interview that she was not involved in the movie at all.) It was still a fun movie, but it was not nearly as deep as the novel. It feels like it is almost a totally different story about the same theme but I’d love to hear if you think this too.
Also August Moon has its own instagram account. Is this a real band?
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)
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