Robinne Lee is back with a new novel that starts with a car crash and quickly moves into something larger: race, identity and the political unease of 2015/2016. Crash Into Me is her follow-up to The Idea of You, and it reaches readers now with the weight of a breakout book already behind it.
That earlier novel sold a million copies, was translated into two dozen languages and later became a feature film for Amazon Studios starring Anne Hathaway. Lee knows the pressure that comes with a book that found a huge audience. In a recent interview, she said she was on medication because she was getting really anxious, and she described the feeling of releasing the new one as both exciting and uneasy.
The novel begins with an accident on Montana Avenue in Los Angeles, a scene Lee knows from life. In December 2016, while waiting to park outside her favorite coffee shop, she was rear-ended with such force that she thought she had killed the woman whose space she wanted. The woman stepped back in time, and everyone was fine. Six months later, Lee published The Idea of You.
Crash Into Me follows Cecilia Chen and Anouk Ferrand after a similar accident on Montana. Cecilia is a Jamaican-Chinese photographer moving to Los Angeles from Paris with her director husband, François, and their teens. Anouk is an enigmatic supermodel, and the two women first met on a photo shoot in Cabo San Lucas in the 1990s. Their story gives Lee room to revisit the glossy, high-drama appeal that built her fan base, but she says the new book goes deeper too, pushing into questions of race, identity and the turmoil of American politics in 2015/2016.
That mix is the point. Lee is not walking away from the sensual, escapist energy that made The Idea of You a pandemic sensation; she is widening it. She said the cult following for that book made her want to satisfy readers again, but this time with a novel that asks more of them and of her. She spent three years with writer’s block, then five years writing once she knew what she wanted to do, followed by 22 months of editing. The result is a sequel in spirit, not in safety.
The bigger question now is whether readers who came for the fantasy will stay for the politics. Lee has already moved the book beyond simple sequel territory, and that is where it lands hardest: as a continuation of the world that made her famous, and a test of whether that audience is ready to follow her into a more volatile one.
