“Crash into Me” is the novel that actress and author Robinne Lee says she always wanted to write.
That’s not to say she isn’t proud of the mega success of her super sexy debut novel, “The Idea of You,” the story of a 40-year-old mom who takes her daughter to Coachella and ends up in a romance with a much-younger singer from a boy band. That 2017 release became a sleeper hit, gaining traction among readers during the pandemic and ultimately becoming an international bestseller. It also inspired a popular Netflix movie by the same title starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine.
And while her sophomore effort “Crash Into Me,” published July 7 by St. Martin’s Press, also delivers a storyline involving a middle-aged woman, a glamorous world – this time, full of movie-making, high fashion and photography – and a complicated, messy romance, the new novel feels weightier, tackling issues of race, status, and the fraught balance of power that can come in a long-term marriage.
“This book is how I have always wanted to write, I think. And it’s how I’d written prior to ‘The Idea of You,’” Lee said from her home in Paris during an interview on a recent episode of Bookish, the virtual program produced by the Southern California News Group, the Bay Area News Group and the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“When I got the idea for ‘The Idea of You,’ I thought, Oh, I could have a lot of fun with this. I could write this, and I could write it well. I’d had enough experiences in my life that I felt like I could do it justice, make it feel very real, and sexy. And I could do it quickly. In a way, it was like what my Duran Duran fantasies in high school were,” said Lee, a graduate of Yale, whose acting career includes credits on “Hitch,” “Hotel for Dogs” and the “Fifty Shades” franchise, among many others.
“So I felt like there was a lot there already that I just had in my back pocket,” she said.
Even so, she admitted that the process wasn’t always easy. “If you know anything about writing, you know that you’re pulling your hair out, and you’re like, am I losing my mind? Why did I think I could do this?”
But writing “Crash Into Me” was a whole new level. Lee said she struggled with writer’s block for three long years.
“I felt like I could not write. Anything I tried, it felt like it was crap. I was just, like, what am I doing? I’ve forgotten how to compose a sentence, I don’t know where words go, I’ve lost my voice, I’ve lost everything,” she said.
Well, not everything: She did have Cecilia Chen, a character she had created on the page even before she thought up the idea for her first novel. Cecilia, like the author herself, is of Jamaican and Chinese heritage. Lee imagined her as a photographer and had even given the character a cameo appearance in “The Idea of You.” Lee thought, “What if I pick up Cecilia’s story later in life? Have her balance motherhood, a demanding career, and marriage to a French director?” Lee’s challenge became crafting a story around the characters.
And then real life intervened.
While driving through Santa Monica one day, Lee stopped to wait for a car pulling out of a parking space, only to be rear-ended by another car, which slammed her car into the one backing out of the parking space. Glass flew, the cars were wrecked – but somehow she and the other drivers, all women, emerged unscathed. Overwhelmed with gratitude that no one was hurt, the three women embraced.
Lee remembers that when one of the drivers’ husbands arrived to the scene, he was surprised. “‘Women are so different,’ he said, ‘if this were three men, it wouldn’t look like this. We’d be arguing, we’d be, like, ‘it’s your fault’…you’re hugging each other, like you’ve known each other for years!’
“And at that moment, I thought, God, this is a great scene for a book…Wouldn’t this be an interesting opening for a story, and, like, how these lives could come together? Maybe they know each other, maybe they don’t. And so that’s where it all started.”
And that is indeed where “Crash Into Me” literally starts. The character of Cecilia Chen rams into Anouk Ferrand, a striking, enigmatic model that Cecilia had known two decades earlier while working on a photo shoot in Mexico. And it’s this chance second meeting and attraction between the two women that threatens to upend Cecilia’s life. The story is told in two interwoven timelines, with Cecilia narrating her current reality in the first-person point of view, and the past intrigue of what occurred between the women in Mexico told in the third person.
But this book is more than romance. Issues about racial tension and safety for the character’s biracial children complicate the narrative. Lee said her choice to do that was informed by high-profile news about gun violence that weighed on her thoughts as she was writing, from the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where her parents live.
“It all felt like it was happening, and it was happening close by, and I didn’t feel like I could sit down and write another book that was just … a love story. I couldn’t write it as a love story that felt incredibly escapist, or just all glamour without really going into the grittier undersides of what was happening,” she said.
The result, she said, is a book that “kind of weaves in some feelings of ‘The Idea of You,’ so I wasn’t alienating my readers completely, but that also felt like a story for me, and the story that I’d always wanted to tell.”
To see the full interview with Lee, go to the Southern California News Group YouTube page. Also on that episode is a conversation with writer Davin Malasarn about his debut novel, “The Outer Country.” To view any of the previous episodes of the program from the past six years, go to Southern California News Group Virtual Events.