If you’ve yet to read Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, you’re lucky. A richly hot (and also agonizing) adventure awaits—and you’ll probably find the film version, premiering on May 2 and starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, perfectly enjoyable. As a tortured superfan of the book, however, I can’t not see the adaptation as essentially failing the source material. The film, directed by Michael Showalter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, dulls the book’s boldness, drastically diminishes its heroine, and, in an industry that fancies itself more inclusive in recent years, re-casts characters of color with white actors.
It helps to know that The Idea of You isn’t just a book, but a novelistic manifesto for middle-aged female readers. Though released in 2017, it became “the sleeper hit of the pandemic,” as I wrote for Vogue in 2020, powered by a passionate, dominantly female word-of-mouth campaign. In the throes of isolation, restlessness, and over-mothering, The Idea of You opened a portal to a glittering alternate universe, one in which a sophisticated 39-year-old L.A. art gallerist and divorcée, Solène Marchand, forges a cosmic connection with 20-year-old British boy band member Hayes Campbell, a young god written with glimmers of Harry Styles and other famous lads, including Eddie Redmayne and Prince Harry. An electric, globe-trotting affair ensues, hurtling them from Cap d’Antibes to the Hamptons and Japan.
People who love The Idea of You do so with borderline unhealthy obsessiveness. We lose sleep reading it on weeknights. We join Facebook groups about it. We re-read it and binge the audiobook narrated by Lee, a veteran actress who nails all the accents in her velvety voice. There’s even a name for us: Haysolnuts (a portmanteau inspired by the fictional couple). We’re wooed not just by the travel, the copious, deftly written sex, or the overlap between the two (Hayes ministering to Solène atop a yacht in Anguilla springs to mind), but the subversiveness of a May-December romance in which a woman is the elder; the all-too-rare “story about a woman approaching 40 and reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself,” as Lee told me, “just at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.”
The Yale-educated author knew how stories like this are typically received in a patriarchal culture and, in a meta twist, she funneled that theme into The Idea of You. “We take art that appeals to women—film, books, music—and we undervalue it,” Solène tells Hayes of his boy band, August Moon, in what became a much-shared quote, including after Barbie’s best-director snub. “We assume it can’t be high art.”