The Idea of You author, Robinne Lee, has one thing to say about the film adaptation of her guide.
“Some readers have been viewing this story about ageism, sexism, the double same old, motherhood, feminine friendship, company, and the dark side of superstar as nothing more than ‘fluff,’” she wrote for Time in a guest piece revealed on Thursday, May 2. “They excited by the love tale and the intercourse to the exclusion of the other pertinent topics of the e-book. They called it a romance. It was once now not.”
She persisted: “Romance novels have explicit regulations, and my ebook didn't apply them. But it was once categorised and classified as such.”
Published in 2017, Lee’s The Idea of You revolves around Solène, a 40-year-old unmarried mother who finds herself impulsively attracted to Hayes Campbell, the 24-year-old frontman of a boy band called August Moon. Their speedy romance encounters hindrances stemming from their age gap, Hayes’ superstar status and Solène’s teenage daughter’s love for August Moon. The movie, which stars Anne Hathaway as Solène and Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes, dropped on Thursday (and aged up the daughter).
Lee, additionally an actor, instructed Time that when she began writing The Idea of You in 2014, she “didn’t plan on writing something that was once revolutionary or controversial,” including, “As any person who was once in that age vary and who will have to have simply been hitting my stride in my skilled life as an actor, I was seeing the sudden shift in parts to be had to me.”
Lee when put next the response to the novel to Hayes’ own insecurities about calling his boyband. She went directly to quote the book in the Time piece: “We take art that appeals to girls — movie, books, song — and we undervalue it. We think it could actually’t be high artwork. Especially if it’s not dark and tortured and wailing. And it follows that a lot of that artwork is created by means of different girls, and so we undervalue them as smartly. We wrap it up in a lovely purple bundle and resist calling it artwork.”
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Lee defined “that sentiment has resonated with me extra in the years since I wrote this line of dialogue than ever ahead of.” She defined: “I considered it when Barbie changed into the greatest box-office hit of 2023 and the highest-grossing movie ever directed via a lady, yet Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were not nominated for Best Director or Best Actress, respectively, at the Oscars. I considered it once I revisited critics’ resistance to Taylor Swift and the dismissal of her fandom for the first decade of her profession, writing both off as juvenile and unserious.”
Lee primarily aimed to explore the issues of ageing and societal perceptions of a lady’s worth. In a December 2020 interview with Vogue, Lee elaborated on the message she sought to convey through the novel while also denying well-liked commentary that the novel reads as Harry Styles fanfiction.
“This was once by no means intended to be a e book about Harry Styles. Nor was once it ever supposed as a vintage, fuzzy romance,” Lee stated at the time. “It used to be meant to be a story about a girl approaching Forty and reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself, just at the point that society historically writes ladies off as desirable and viable and entire.”
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