Robinne Lee, whose new novel “Crash Into Me” debuted July 7, is a study in perseverance, risk-taking, and reinvention. She came to prominence as an actress appearing in “Being Mary Jane” and “Fifty Shades Darker,” and co-starring with Mario Van Peebles in the series “Superstition.” Educated at Yale, she was a lawyer before becoming an actress.
In her 2017 bestselling novel “The Idea of You,” Lee bravely navigated the terrain of a May-December romance where the woman was closer to the end of the calendar than the man. The novel became a bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine.
However, Lee had always seen herself as a writer. “I was a writer long before I was a lawyer,” she said in a recent interview with the AmNews. “I wanted to be a writer and actor for as long as I can remember.” So serious was she that she completed her first novel — handwritten — in ninth grade, followed by several unpublished manuscripts, before writing “The Idea of You,” which she finished in about 15 months.
Many aspects of photographer Cecilia Chen, the protagonist of “Crash Into Me,” draw from Lee’s own life. While Lee lived in the Los Angeles area for many years as an actress, she fulfilled a lifelong dream four years ago and made Paris her new home base. Like Cecilia, Lee is a married mother of two, of biracial (Asian and Afro-Caribbean) ancestry, interested in photography, and an American francophile who relocated to Paris.
Lee’s love for French culture was an unlikely inheritance from her Caribbean parents. “My parents were huge Francophiles. I just kind of followed in their footsteps.”
Cecilia becomes entangled with Anouk Ferrand, a supermodel she knew in her youth. Lee also had firsthand exposure to fashion. Her cousin Gail O’Neill was a leading Black model, and Lee interned at Elle magazine in New York and Paris while in college.
“Crash Into Me” uses a relationship that finally ignites after several decades to examine important themes of identity and belonging. “I was born and raised in America,” Lee said, “but I spent a great deal of time with family in the Caribbean and so I feel like that part of the story, that culture, the Jamaican-ness is all very similar. The struggle to assimilate is similar, and trying to fit in multiple cultures.”
Lee said that as someone from an immigrant family, she had to come to a more nuanced understanding of Blackness apart from the relatively flattened characterizations shaped by mass media. “Growing up, I didn’t really think about it a lot. I was cushioned by my Jamaican-ness, and not seeing what the different dynamics [were] that my African American friends were going through.”
Lawrence Otis Graham’s seminal work, “Our Kind of People,” played a critical role in expanding the boundaries of Lee’s own understanding of Black identity. “It was this huge eye-opening moment — looking at our culture and who we are through one of our own’s eyes, but [realizing] that ‘our own’ wasn’t even mine. There were so many of us who had different perspectives of what it is to be Black in America, or what it is to be middle- or upper-middle-class, or working class Black in America.”
Like “The Idea of You,” “Crash Into Me” explores another unconventional romance, this time between a married woman and a globally famous supermodel from her past. The book travels back and forth between the 1990s and the 20-teens. “I had to figure out how to make my characters in 2015 believable as the adults of the 20-somethings we saw in 1996. It was tricky. It was not an easy book to write at all.”
The sexuality of the “Crash Into Me” characters in the ’90s as young adults vs. the 20-teens mirrors different sociopolitical realities. “I’m Generation X,” said Lee, “and I feel there are labels put on Gen X about sexuality that are no longer as adherent on these younger generations. I kind of feel like Gen Z, even millennials, are much more comfortable with being fluid.”
That is also something Lee has considered from a very personal perspective. “There are definitely attractions one way or another that I didn’t act on, because I was kind of like, ‘Well, that’s not who I am’ as opposed to, ‘Why can’t I be this person or that person? Why can’t I try this out?’ I think a lot of Gen X people who read this book will feel similarly — what if we didn’t have those stigmas attached?”
Asked whether Cecilia’s white husband and rarefied world distance her from Blackness, Lee said, “I feel, for Cecilia, it’s coming to figure it out and feeling comfortable saying, ‘Okay, I can be all these things. That’s who I am, and I don’t have to be this textbook definition of what people are expecting that to be.’ And who writes those definitions? Is it white Hollywood? Is it a certain class of black people deciding this?”
Lee, like Cecilia Chen, continues to chart her own course, writing and rewriting her own definition of who she is.
Visit robinnelee.com for more info.writing her own definition of who she is.
