In December 2016, Robinne Lee was waiting to park near her favorite coffee shop on Montana Avenue in Los Angeles when she was rear-ended with "horrifying velocity." The impact sent her car lurching toward a woman stepping off the curb, and for a moment, Lee believed she had killed her. Miraculously, the woman stepped back just in time. All three drivers emerged unharmed and shared an emotional embrace in the aftermath. One of the husbands observed that if three men had been involved, they would likely have argued instead of comforting one another. That moment stayed with Lee, sparking the idea for her new novel, Crash Into Me.
The book, released a decade after the accident, opens with a similar collision on Montana Avenue and centers on the unexpected bond between two women: Cecilia Chen, a Jamaican-Chinese photographer relocating from Paris to Los Angeles with her director husband and their teenagers, and Anouk Ferrand, a mysterious supermodel Cecilia once photographed in Cabo San Lucas in the 1990s. Cecilia first appeared as a minor character in Lee's debut novel, The Idea of You, which became a pandemic sensation. That book, about a 40-year-old gallerist's affair with a 20-year-old boy band member, has sold over a million copies, been translated into two dozen languages, and is being adapted into a film by Amazon Studios starring Anne Hathaway.
Crash Into Me carries forward Lee's signature blend of sultry romance and globe-trotting glamour but ventures into deeper thematic territory. While her earlier work examined ageism and female desire, this novel delves into race, identity, and the political turbulence of 2015 and 2016 in America. Lee describes it as an evolution of her storytelling. She has been dubbed the "patron saint of horny moms everywhere" and "the bard of high-class smut," but Crash Into Me pushes beyond titillation. The novel revisits the intensity of sudden connection, the randomness of fate, and the quiet transformations that follow trauma.Robinne Lee based a pivotal scene in Crash Into Me on a real car accident she caused in 2016, where no one was hurt but emotions ran high. The husband of one driver remarked that men would have fought, not hugged, after such a crash—yet Lee's fictional retelling centers on women finding intimacy through chaos. The real event involved a near-miss with a pedestrian, but the novel turns that fragility into a metaphor for deeper societal fractures. Lee's own description of the accident as "terrifying" contrasts sharply with the glamorous, entangled lives she constructs in fiction.
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