I am so inspired by people who love what they do. It’s not just about someone who happens to enjoy their job—this extends to people who are really passionate about a hobby or anything in their life that lights them up when they talk about it. There’s a certain energy, an aliveness, that emanates from someone who is doing exactly what they were put on this earth to do, no matter the detours it took to get them there. That’s how I felt while talking to today’s guest, actress and author Robinne Lee.
I feel like I see bits of myself in her—she was also born to Jamaican immigrant parents and grew up in Westchester County, New York. She was naturally drawn to storytelling through writing and acting from an early age. Her parents pushed her toward an academic path, and she pursued a law degree, thinking that maybe she’d be satisfied working on the business side of a creative industry, but her passion for acting couldn’t be extinguished. Her creative side eventually won when she made her screen debut in 1997. Since then, she’s appeared in films like Deliver Us From Eva, Hitch, Hotel for Dogs, and the Fifty Shades trilogy, as well as the TV show Being Mary Jane.
In 2017, she added author to her resume with her breakout novel, The Idea of You—about a divorced single mother who falls in love with a member of the boy band her young daughter is obsessed with, which sold a million copies and became a hit film starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine. Robinne centers her storytelling on women over 40, unapologetically portraying midlife as desirable, sexual, and fully alive. Her sophomore novel, Crash Into Me, is no different. It's a complex, multilayered story about Cecilia Chen, a Chinese-Jamaican artist, wife, and mother whose life is thrown into question when a chance car accident reunites her with someone from her past. Their kismet encounter turns into an affair that threatens to upend everything she’s been trying to build with her family after moving from Paris to Los Angeles.
Robinne and I covered a lot in this conversation, from her Jamaican upbringing and how she simultaneously pursued a law degree and acting, to why she centers women of a certain age in her stories, our shared affinity for life outside the U.S. (she's currently living in Paris with her family), and her advice for anyone who dreams of writing a book—myself included. Listen to the podcast for the full conversation, or enjoy this edited and condensed version below.
Welcome to FWD JOY, Robinne. I just want to jump into this because we both have Jamaican immigrant parents. We're both raised in Westchester.
Robinne: Yes. I was born in Mount Vernon Hospital.
Where are your parents from?
Robinne: My parents are from Kingston. My dad's originally from Annotto Bay.
My dad is also from an area right outside of Annotto Bay. So when I was reading Crash Into Me, I was like, this is crazy…My dad grew up at the top of this mountain. His family had cows and chickens, all the animals. His grandparents are buried in the backyard. That whole deal. It's really special.
Robinne: That's so wonderful. Do you go back often?
I started going back every year in 2016 with my dad. I went last year. I try to go regularly because we still have family down there, and also it's the most incredible place on the planet.
Robinne: It's very special. I grew up going every summer when I was young. And then I moved to LA, and then it was just harder to get there. Then I had kids. I was not going as frequently, and I've been twice maybe since the pandemic. I think I've been twice since we moved to Paris. We moved to Paris shortly after the pandemic. So I'm due for a trip back.
What were you like as a kid?
Robinne: I was an interesting kid. I was creative. I was nerdy. I was loud and talkative. I feel like all of my interests as a child kind of panned out, and everything that I do now kind of reflects who I was then. I was very much a theater kid. I was in the drama club, and I did acting classes after school. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I had a journal I kept religiously. I started writing. I started writing short stories in third grade. I wrote my first book when I was 14. It was 884 pages handwritten. I was always with the pen.
You went to Yale undergrad, right? You were a real smarty. I'm curious what your Jamaican parents thought about your creative pursuits.
Robinne: I tell this story often that on the drive up to Yale, my dad said, "Don't think we're sending you to Yale to study drama." So I was a psychology major. After Yale, I had to make a deal with them that I would sign up for the LSATs and apply to law school if I could pursue an acting career. So I was doing them simultaneously in New York. Wow.
Okay. That's a lot.
Robinne: I was freelance writing. I'd started a company with a girlfriend. We were managing a singing group. I was doing all these different endeavors. I was afraid of trying to pursue a creative profession where I was the creative. I'll just be the business person. I don't have to be the person on stage and in front of the camera, but I had a moment in law school the summer between second and third year, which is the summer you're usually a summer associate at a firm.
I was at a really prestigious New York law firm, they wine and dine you. They took us to see two Broadway shows. We saw Death of a Salesman and Rent. We were like second or third row. I look back at all my other fellow summer associates, and I was like, I belong there. I belong on the stage, not here watching it. That was my epiphany. I’d finished law school, I'd take the bar just so that I'd had it, it would be done. I would not be happy if I didn't pursue the creative part and fully commit to it. I was like, "Okay, I'll give it three years. I'll give it five years." And then 20 years, 30 years later, I was like, "My God, I'm really an actress, I guess." This is what I do.
You really did it. I know it's so funny as you talk about when you're watching Rent because I also grew up as a very much a performing arts kid. I was in the school chorus, I played the violin and then I switched to clarinet. I did school plays. I was also studying ballet and tap.
I ended up quitting all of those creative pursuits, but anytime I go to see a play, or I saw the Christmas spectacular this past Christmas and watching the Rockettes, it feels very emotional for me. I'm like, "What if that could have been my life?" I was meant for other things. I was also really interested in fashion once I got to middle school. So then my singular focus became I wanted to work at a fashion magazine.
Robinne: That's what I did. I interned at Elle Magazine. I spent my junior year abroad, and I worked for the French office for the year. I wanted to do all those things. I was trying to do everything. I feel like everything I did has kind of come together and works its way into my writing.
I just love that. What actresses did you grow up looking up to?
Robinne: I've loved Cate Blanchett for a very long time. Julianne Moore, Angela Bassett, Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet.
As you started booking jobs as an actress, how did that feel for you?
Robinne: It's so funny. In the beginning, it was totally magic, surreal. I was living my dream. I remember I was shooting Deliver Us From Eva within a year and a half of moving to LA, right after law school. I remember we were shooting one of those scenes in the beauty parlor. We were shooting in Altadena. We came out of the beauty parlor. It was magic hour in between shots, and the sun was setting. The sky was pink. The mountains were there. It was December and 70 degrees. I had this moment like, oh my God, I live in LA, and I make movies. This is crazy. I'll never forget, it's like pinching myself. I couldn't believe it.
You were acting for many years, but was this little birdie still in your ear that you needed to write a book?
Robinne: I was writing simultaneously. Right after I had my first son, I worked on a book for about six years, and I couldn't get quite to where I wanted it to be, and I put it aside, and then two years later I got the idea for The Idea of You. I knew it was something that could be a big book, and I could sell, but I didn't want to put in six years again and find out it wasn't quite right and I wasn't going to be able to sell it. So I was like, I'm going to write this as quickly as possible. I finished a draft, a decent draft, in 15 months. I workshopped it with my writer's group. I spent about three months on their notes. The first agent I sent it to loved it, signed me. He spent a couple of months doing notes. I spent two months incorporating his notes, and he sold it in two and a half weeks. It happened so fast.
I just got the chills. That's incredible.
Robinne: It never happens that quickly, but I used to say that it was my stress relief from acting because I could do it at any point in time. I wasn't waiting for someone to give me permission to do it. I could go anywhere I wanted in my mind. I can play all the characters in my mind that Hollywood was not allowing me to play, you know what I mean?
I could write for all those characters. I could create the world. I could say what I wanted them to say and make them do what I wanted them to do. And at the end of the day, I could have something to show for it. You can work for hours and hours on an audition and you can work with a coach, you can run it with your partner, you do your hair, your makeup, you go to the set, I mean, you go to the lot, whatever, or the cast office, you put in a lot of work and then it's like, okay, thank you. That's it. You have nothing to show for all those hours.
There's so much uncertainty. You have no control.
Robinne: So much uncertainty. But I open my laptop, and if I sit down, if I were to put in eight hours on my laptop straight, I've got something to show at the end of the day.
I created this out of nothing, out of thin air. I created this story, and these characters and these people and this scene, and it was so freeing, and it was such a ... I mean, I think artists just need to find a vessel. They need a way to create in any way.
So your first book, The Idea of You, has sold over a million copies. Then it got made into a monster hit movie. I own it, I've watched it multiple times. Anne and Nicholas are so hot in it. I recently read the book. The book is just so much meatier. You get so much more out of the connection. I blew through that book so quickly.
Robinne: It's a special story for me. It was a really incredible experience writing it, and I was very attached to those characters. I did not want it to end the process of writing. I could have lived in their world for another 10 years. I just really loved creating for them and writing for both of them. They were so real and alive and special to me.
And your book that's coming out in July, Crash Into Me, is not a sequel. Talk to me a little bit about what's your elevator pitch for Crash Into Me?
Robinne: Crash Into Me is a story about Cecilia Chen, a Jamaican Chinese artist who was raised in the States but fled to Paris about 20 years before the story begins. She's married to a French filmmaker, she's got two kids, and her husband gets a job shooting a trilogy in Hollywood, and the entire family has to pick up and move to LA. It's kind of a reverse culture shock. She's moving back to America after 20 years of living in Europe, and they moved to this very wealthy enclave on the west side of LA where she is very much an outsider. Very early on in the story, she runs into, literally, in a car accident, [with] someone from her past, and they embark on this very relationship that becomes very intense and complex and inevitably threatens to upend Cecilia's entire life. And it's another woman. It’s a story with all these layers about class, wealth, privilege, fame, identity, culture, sexuality, desire, and betrayal. And power. There you go. Those are all the things.
What inspired you to write this story? I'm not completely finished, but on Monday morning I could not get out of bed because I couldn't put it down.
Robinne: I love hearing that. First of all, in 2016, I was in a car accident very similar to the one that Cecilia’s in. I was in Los Angeles exactly where that car accident happened. And it was this moment when the three of us in the accident were all comforting each other and making sure everyone was okay. And the woman that hit me, her husband had come to the scene and he was observing us and he started to laugh and he said, "Women are so different from men because if this had been men, we would be fighting, we'd be arguing, we'd be blaming. You guys are literally hugging each other."
As he said that, I was thinking he's so right. Once I get over the PTSD of this accident, I'm going to think about how this is going to work into a story because I felt like it was such an interesting moment of lives coming together so randomly and violently and they could go anywhere, the relationships go anywhere.
And so Crash Into Me is unlike The Idea of You, in that it's not a strict romance. You write quite a bit about politics, being Black in America, raising mixed children in America. Why was that all important to you?
Robinne: I wasn't seeing it in literature through my perspective. Yes, there are tons of books, a lot of great books about African-Americans’ experience or immigrant experiences in America and immigrants of color and African immigrant cinema, like there's Americana. But to bring it into a story like this that was kind of sexy and nuanced and different that had plays of power and fame and celebrity and Hollywood, but also Hollywood through a perspective we almost never see. I feel like a lot of the time I lived in LA, I was in that position. I felt like I was straddling this very weird line, not fully fitting in one way or the other, really having to be intentional about finding community and finding my people and making communities because it wasn't like I was just going to happen upon anything.
Why did you decide to make it a same sex love affair in Crash Into Me?
Robinne: I don't know. It wasn't supposed to be a love affair. It was supposed to be this kind of intense friendship and maybe manipulative and obsessive and maybe kind of single white female-ish, but I just started writing them, and I was writing for one character. I was really attracted to the other character, and I thought, I'm just going to see where this goes. Sometimes you have to do that. You just kind of follow the trail, and it's like I find, anyway, the more I get to know my character, the more I fall in love with them. So it was interesting to get to know Anouk through Cecilia's eyes, and this took perspective because that wasn't necessarily where I was going to go. It wasn't my intention. I didn't set out to write that, but then I realized that's what I was writing, so I better do some more research. I really just fell for this character, and I fell for that link they had, that their relationship, their kind of push-pull, and the tension between them.
Sometimes it's like you throw a bunch of people together in one room and you see what happens. And sometimes as a writer, you just have to trust that that's going to happen. As an actor, when you're doing improv, there's this rule called “yes and.” Someone gives you something, it's like, “oh my God, did you hear Mike die today?” You can't be like, no, he didn't. You killed the scene. “Yes and did you know that he left behind seven kids?” You know what I mean? Whatever it is, it's yes and.
Right, you keep the story going.
Robinne: Keep a story going. Otherwise, it's just dead in the water. So sometimes you're writing for your characters, and it just has to be like yes and. And you're hearing their voices and you're like, "Yeah, I'm going with that. She's attracted to her. And now it's going to be a mutual thing." You know what I mean? There are some writers who they call them plotters and pantsters and some really plot really tightly and have their outline and stick to it and others fly by the seat of their pants and I plot a little bit, but then if my pants take me somewhere, I'm like, okay, we're shifting this… My characters know where they're going.
With both of these books, you really center women 40 and over, and their desire, their pleasure. Has that been important for you to portray?
Robinne: Absolutely. Part of wanting to write The Idea of You was turning 40 in LA in Hollywood. LA itself is a difficult place to turn 40, but as an actor, turning 40 in the business and seeing the types of roles I was being considered for shift so drastically. It used to be like, I mean, I started a long time ago, so it was the ingenue, the kid, the teenager, whatever. And then it's like the co-ed, the pretty girl, the wife, the young mom, and suddenly every description was like, “ 40, was once beautiful, but has seen better days”
Oh my God. I just turned 40.
Robinne: “Used to be attractive but now is tired.” Every description, obviously written by men, was saying, "Oh, you're past your prime. You are no longer sexually viable. You are no longer the object of our desire as a viewer of this project." You get enough auditions like that, you want to fight back. Either you shop for a gun, and you're like, I'm going to hit the streets and start up a revolt. Women revolt or you write a book, and you're like, "You know what? F you, we are still sexual at 40. We are still thinking about sex. We are still having sex. We are still sexy.” I wanted to put that out there. I don't own a gun. That's how I fight back.
So many women were so happy to see that and to see this perspective that centered them and their sexuality, their individuality, their identity, them as a complex being layered and not just a mom or not just a wife. Not put in a box, but these fully formed beings that did and wanted multiple things and contained multitudes. I wanted to continue to write that. I wanted to do that for Cecilia. I wanted it for Anouk. Even the characters that are more superficial, I didn't want to make them two-dimensional.
Your books are quite sexy. There's detailed sex scenes. I know in the romance genre, some books are steamier than others, some kind of just might skip over that. So why did you feel like you wanted to write out those details?
Robinne: I think it's just how I've always written. I started by writing fan fiction as a teenager. So I've always been comfortable and confident in writing sex scenes, and it didn't have to be about the sex, but I knew how to weave it into the story. For me, very much so in The Idea of You, and there's less sex in this book because there's more going on. But in The Idea of You, I didn't want them physically naked unless they're going to be emotionally naked. So every time they're naked, they're revealing something new to each other or to the reader. There's nothing gratuitous. Every sex scene was pushing the story forward, and it was revealing something new. And the same with Crash Into Me.
I thought there's a certain kind of book where authors choose to glance over it, and it does it a disservice..There's some books that they don't need it. They glance over it, and it's fine because it continues with the story. But I feel like if you are giving me every detail of a relationship, especially a new relationship and it's a loving relationship and it's a central relationship, I feel like when you close the doors, it's a bit of a cop out because it's like, why are you going to tell me all the details of the color of his eyes, his lashes, whatever, how it felt when you did this. And then you don't ...because if your relationship is moving forward, we reveal so much of ourselves having sex, so much to our partners and to pretend that's not happening there feels false to me.
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm sure you've watched Heated Rivalry, the conversations around the sex in that show and some people feeling like it was gratuitous or whatnot or that the show didn't have a plot. The relationship is the plot and the sex is integral to the story.
Robinne: And then seeing them reveal themselves emotionally, how they become more emotionally accessible to each other and what it takes to get them from random hookups to episode six in the cottage. You're crying in that episode. Oh my God, finally.
I know I was obsessed. And around that time, there was an article in The Atlantic that said that 40% of Gen Z participants in the survey said that they turn a movie off once they hit a sex scene.
Robinne: Wow.
It also said that the amount of sex scenes in the 250 highest-grossing films had fallen by 40% since 2020, while violence, drugs, and profanity have kind of remained the same.
Robinne: That's really sad. It makes me happy that I moved to France. Sex is not going anywhere in France, and the violence stays low. That's really sad though because I mean
It's an integral part of being human and connected. And we don't need violence and drugs, but we do need sex to continue our existence.
Can we talk about your writing process and rituals?
Robinne: When I'm writing, I'm in the zone. I try to write every day. I did an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld once, and I love her work, love, love, love. She says she tries to touch the manuscript every day. So even if you're going to change whatever, you're opening it up, you're looking at it—you don't take off a week or a month. Okay, where was I? You know what I mean? Not that I would ever take off a month, but you don't even take off a week to say, where was I? So within 24 hours, it's like your Duolingo.
Do you have tea? Can you listen to music?
Robinne: It changes. I'm a tea person. With Crash Into Me, I didn't listen to as much music. The Idea of You, I listened to a lot, but I still created playlists for both of them because I feel like it helps me set the scene, especially with time. In Crash Into Me, there’s flashbacks to 1996, so I needed that. With The Idea of You, she was dating a guy who was much younger and in a band. I had a lot of music from 2014 to 2015. But I also wanted music that he would listen to that she wouldn't necessarily. I had a lot of Ed Sheeran, which I thought was kind of her vibe, The Fray, some Taylor Swift. When I'm writing sex scenes or love scenes, whatever, I tend to find a song that suits that one and play it over and over and over again to get in the mood, but then also to feel like I have a soundtrack for that scene.
I love the idea of a book having a soundtrack. Does location help you? I'm assuming The Idea of You was written in LA and Crash Into Me in Paris?
Robinne: Well, the first hundred, maybe 200, I wrote in LA before moving to Paris. And then I spent a summer back East and wrote another 100 or 70 pages. I was all over. When I'm writing in cafes, it changes because in France, in Europe in general, it's easier for me to tune out conversations. In America, it's not because they're speaking English and I hear everything. But in French, if I'm focusing, I can understand, but if I don't focus, it's just background noise. When I'm really locked in, I'm just alone in my room, whether it's a hotel room or it's my office here, and I don't have extra noise.
And I know you’ve said you had writer's block for a few years before this book. What was that like and how did you get over that?
Robinne: It was hell, I'd never had anything like that before. That was for ending The Idea of You. I was so in love with those characters. I missed them. I miss writing for them. I felt guilty about how they ended. I felt badly for him. I cried for him forever. I would go into my closet and cry for, I want to say, like a year, a full year. Because I couldn't do it in my bedroom because my husband would be like, "You're crying about Hayes Campbell again?" How do you explain to your husband you are crying about someone who does not exist, but you are so in love with this person that does not exist. A, you've broken his heart, B, he doesn't exist. And you're crying—
Your husband's like, "I think it's time for us to go to couple's therapy."
Robinne: I didn't want to write for anyone else for a while after. And then anything I came up with, I was like, "It's not as good as Haze and Solene. It's not Hayes. It's not Solene." But I felt like I couldn't write. I'd started something new. Every new story just sounded like, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to write. And then I didn't know. I really didn't. I felt a lot of frustration because the book was published and a lot of people were expecting it to be a romance and to follow the romance formula, and it didn't. So I got a lot of irate letters from people who were angry at me wanting a sequel. I'd never intended to write a sequel. I was really kind of thrown like, what did I do wrong to make them think this was a romance or market it as a romance or package it as a romance? Is that my fault? How does one write a love story that's clearly not a romance? You know what I mean?
Right. I know there's a whole thing in the romance genre of the HEA, happily ever after, but does your book have to have a happily ever after for it to be considered a romance?
Robinne: There are people who believe so, yes. I think the majority do. Or a happy for now, and then you fix it in book two or book three. They don't want to hear that you're not going to fix it. They were really angry, and I was like, I don't want to go through that again. How do I write something that has emotion, feeling, love, and sex, but that they're not tempted to call a romance. So that was part of it, the writer's block, and then people were really loving it. And then I thought, well, how do I write something that they're going to really love again? How do I write something that my agents will love? My writer's group will love, my editors will love. All that stuff was weighing on me. And then we were in the first post-Obama administration, and things were kind of tricky.
There was a lot going on in the country that was worrisome. There were a lot of school shootings or a lot of unnecessary police shootings. There was a lot weighing on me, and I didn't feel like I could just write some happy, cheerful, rosy love story. The Me Too revelation was happening in Hollywood. I was super aware of that and what a lot of women were feeling and the frustration and the anger and the pain and what women telling their stories and people not believing them or having told stories all along and people not believing them and it taking something like 90 people to come forward before they lock certain people up. I couldn't just write something that was going to be easy because I wasn't feeling like life was easygoing. Understandable. And I had kids and I was worried for them in multiple ways and I'm a woman of color, I'm a woman, all these different things were weighing on me and I thought it would be false or kind of like a lie to put out another story of a woman and maybe specifically a woman not of color or not white presenting who wasn't being affected by all these things.
And not to say that again, we contain multitudes. We can be affected by all these things but still be desirous of others and you know what I mean?
Yeah. That's life, isn't it? Being able to hold two truths, like that the world is terrible, but I still want to have a good time.
Robinne: Right. Exactly. I want to feel beautiful. I want to be admired. I want to create art. I want to have sex. I want to do all these things even though the world is terrible.
For anyone who's interested in writing a book (myself included), what advice do you have?
Robinne: Read, read, read, read, read, read the kind of books that you want to write, and also read other books. I think part of the reason people love The Idea of You so much is because a lot of those who did love it and didn't have a problem with it thought they were getting a romance and then felt like, "Oh, this is so much different. This is delivering something different." And it's because I didn't read romance. I wasn't reading romance. I read a lot of literary fiction. So it's just more literary than most romance novels, and it was not following the rules. And so there were a lot of surprises for them just in the way the stories were told, the language that I use, the culmination of them coming together and then falling apart, all of that was different because I was reading different types of books. So I think if you're only reading one kind of book, you get locked into that. And that's fine if that's the kind of book you want to write. But if you want to bend the rules a little and/or bend the genres a little or stretch even, then read different kinds of genres. For the last 10 years, I've read a lot of romance because the way my book was positioned, I have a lot of friends now in the romance world. And so I blurb a lot, and I read a lot of romance, but I've returned to reading literary fiction these last several months. Also, it's hard for me to read when I'm writing because I'm so influenced by other voices. So I've just returned to reading literary fiction. And there was a period, too, with The Idea of You when I was reading more suspenseful stuff. I was reading a lot of Gillian Flynn and stuff like that because I wanted to see how suspense looks on the page and to feel that because I don't read a ton of suspense, and I wanted this book to be suspenseful, even though it was going to have more literary elements and it has some romance. But I think reading is invaluable, and I think you can tell a writer who is well read, you know what I mean? And it's not just vocabulary; it's just rhythm. I think there's a rhythm to writing. I think it really helps to write out loud. I'm constantly reading and rereading and rereading what I've written out loud so I can hear it. I can hear if I've repeated the same word three times in two paragraphs even. You know what I mean?
I do that quite a bit for my newsletter. I typically write a personal essays and I will read it out loud and sometimes even just record myself reading it out loud. Similarly, I never really used to read romance—I read a lot of nonfiction. Honestly, it was Heated Rivalry that got me into reading romance. So I blew through all six of those books, and then I picked up your book because I love that movie. So I was like if I'm someone who loves, love, maybe I actually should be reading more romance novels. I really want to write something nonfiction, but I can also imagine a world in which I might want to dabble in the fiction as well.
Robinne: The other thing is I tell everyone to get into a writers’ group. It's one of the most important things because you're workshopping other people, you learn from their mistakes, and you learn what really works because you cannot possibly put out the amount of material a group of you will put out. You know what I mean?
You can see different writers at different stages of progress in a specific piece, but also at different levels of writing. And you see what works and what doesn't work. You see how a revision can be flawless and the notes they got between revision number one and revision two or one and seven, whatever, how much a piece can grow and how much a writer can grow. It helps to expose yourself to all that because when we're reading books, we're reading books that have been ... If you're reading not self-published books, you're reading books that have been edited and edited and copywritten and edited a myriad of times, especially the bigger, better houses, publishing houses. So you don't realize what the writer turns in and how many passes a writer takes, even before the publishing team gets involved.
Even for my newsletter, I have an editor. I really appreciate the feedback, of course, as any writer does, but I also sometimes feel very sensitive about it. Have you struggled with that?
Robinne: I totally do. Because you also want to be like, "Oh my God, it’s perfect." Like A+. Also, especially if you're a straight-A student, you're used to people, I'm like, "A+, done." And like, "What do you mean it's not perfect?"
It's really vulnerable. Writing is so vulnerable.
Robinne: So vulnerable. And you put yourself out there in a way that I don't think you do as an actor. I think as an actor, you are emotionally raw. It's like peeling off your skin and letting people see you go through everything. But the things you're going through on the screen, even if you're challenging something different, the story you're going through typically is not your story. It's something someone else has written. And you can be like, I was able to get that for that writer and that director, and look at this. It's a wonderful collaborative event. But writing, this is all me. Even if I don't approve of my cover, the font, or whatever, or the movie between pages one and 373, that is all me, and there's no hiding. So when people judge it, and they're not kind, it's very painful.
Final question. What's bringing you joy right now?
Robinne: I cannot believe I get to live in Paris with my lover and my kids and write books and stroll along the Seine and sit in cafes. I feel like I'm on vacation every single day here. Even when the weather is crappy, when it's raining, when it's cold, I feel like I'm constantly on vacation. I have so much joy from being in Paris: the architecture, the art, the galleries, the people I've met, the friends I've met, my neighborhood, walking the dog every night by the Seine, and seeing the lights twinkle on the Eiffel Tower.
Robinne’s Reading List
This book was the first gift my husband ever gave me. It was so elegant, atmospheric, and emotional that it cracked my heart wide open. A story so beautiful you can’t help but weep. With language that stops you in your tracks. One of my absolute favorites.
The ultimate boarding school, coming-of-age story. Perfectly captures what it is to feel like a teenage outsider amidst a sea of New England wealth and privilege. The insider/outsider is something I’ve experienced often in my life, and I admire how Sittenfeld handles it with aplomb.
Smith’s celebrated debut let me know that it was okay to write my own Jamaican immigrant story with all its nuances and subtleties. And to do so in a narrative that was unexpected and multi-layered. It was a wake-up call, of sorts.
When I first discovered D. H. Lawrence’s classic in high school, I was gobsmacked! It was to me the sweet spot between literary and smut, and it gave me the inspiration and permission to weave both into my writing.
I thought this movie was ridiculously sexy when I first saw it in my teens and read the book shortly after. Revisiting it as an adult revealed the true toxicity of their relationship with its unforgiving age gap. However, the beauty and sheer poetry of Duras’ writing cannot be ignored.
