After the runaway success of her 2017 romance The Idea of You — adapted into a 2024 film starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine — author Robinne Lee wanted to write something different: “a story about identity, power, and desire, featuring characters that are often overlooked in modern fiction.” The result is her latest novel, Crash Into Me, which follows Cecilia Chen as she reencounters the magnetic supermodel Anouk Ferrand decades after they first met.
Set against “the scintillating backdrop of Hollywood’s elite and the fashion world,” as Lee puts it, the novel is a tale of messy entanglements she recommends for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace — “at once sexy and suspenseful with a healthy dose of social commentary.” Lee, 52, is Paris-based, a graduate of Yale and Columbia Law School, and describes her writing “sweet spot” as “something that’s a little dirty and a little literary.”
Asked about the books that shaped her, Lee traced her love of reading to Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, her favourite childhood book. The novel that made her want to write was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “The idea that a book could be literary and erotic with social commentary was a revelation!” She credits Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things with making her a better writer, calling Roy’s use of alliteration and repetition “masterful.”
Among her recommendations: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, the book she wishes she’d written and her favourite to gift; Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, which she’d love to read again for the first time; and Dionne Irving’s short-story collection The Islands, which pulled her out of a months-long reading slump. She was also newly surprised by Beverly Jenkins’s Indigo, a romance set among freed Black communities along the Underground Railroad, praising how much history it wove in.
As for how she reads, Lee keeps it simple: an autumn or winter Sunday, a blanket, a fireplace, and Earl Grey tea “without any interruptions for hours on end.” Her best tip for staying focused? Leaving her phone in another room.
