Thanks so much for being here. This newsletter is supported by paid subscribers. If you like it here, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $5 a month. It makes a difference. The erotic binds of motherhoodA difficult romance-novel heroine gets a virtuous makeover in "The Idea of You," a new age-gap romcom starring Anne Hathaway.
While I was waiting for an advanced screener of The Idea of You, Amazon Prime’s new age-gap romcom starring Anne Hathaway, I got curious about the viral book that inspired it. I downloaded and speed-read it, which made for a telling juxtaposition once the screener showed up. The film softens the most daring aspects of the book’s protagonist, a 40-year-old divorced mom who falls into a whirlwind romance with a 20-year-old boy band member. That softening says plenty about the assumptions the film’s creators made about what mainstream viewers can handle when it comes to women’s desire—and mothers’ desire, especially. As the film’s director Michael Showalter said by way of explaining the changes, they were “trying to make a movie [that] is broadly appealing.” Soléne was made more acceptable; her erotic edges were smoothed. The broad strokes of the story remain the same: Hathaway’s character, Soléne, takes her daughter to a VIP meet-and-greet for the boy band August Moon (think: One Direction), where sparks fly with Hayes Campbell, one of the group’s members. There follows a lot of top-secret jet-setting to her younger paramour’s global tour locations. They try but fail to avoid the paps—in no small part because her daughter doesn’t know about her boy band love affair—and the relationship leads to headlines à la “MOMMY ISSUES?” The changed details in the film are everything, though. The age gap between the main characters is narrowed by four years: he’s 24, instead of 20, and she’s 40. The movie explicitly calls out the sexism of gendered double-standards around age-gap relationships (men dating younger is often seen as normative), while nevertheless serving up a softened version of the taboo. The film also changes the narrative around Soléne’s divorce: she and Isabelle’s father Daniel split because he had an affair with a younger woman. Despite the betrayal, Soléne wanted to stick it out (“for the good of our family,” she tearfully tells Hayes), but Daniel did not. In the book, they divorce in part because they married young and grew apart, but also because Daniel wanted her to give up her career as an art dealer and fully devote herself to being a wife and a mother. In other words: she left because she was being suffocated by domesticity and wanted more for her life. “I had to redefine myself,” she says in the book. The biggest changes involve her daughter Isabelle. In the film, she’s 15 instead of 12. In the book, Isabelle is an adolescent fully obsessed with August Moon, and with Hayes in particular. In the film, she’s a former fan of the band who now eye-rolls at the mention of them; her clueless father bought tickets to the VIP meet-and-greet without realizing that she had moved on since her teenybopper days. In the book, adolescent Isabelle is heartbroken to eventually discover that her mom has been sneaking around with her favorite boy band member.
In her delusional adolescent fandom, Isabelle sees herself as having had a chance with him, but, in her own words, Hayes “chose” her mom instead. By changing these details, the film tidies up the story’s emotional and moral quandaries. It simplifies and purifies Soléne’s romantic adventure. She isn’t torn between her daughter’s desires and her own; she doesn’t have to choose either motherhood or sexuality. It erases the discomfiting scenario of a daughter seeing her mother as romantic competition, as well as the resonances with that classic fairytale setup of the fertile maiden and sinister, dried-up, baby-snatching crone. All of these challenging and potentially threatening aspects of Soléne’s desire are absent from the film. That is to say nothing of the way the book version of Soléne delights in all aspects of Hayes’ body (from “the veins in his forearms” to his “straight, thick,” and “really nice dick,” which lands “just above his belly button”). She relishes his touch, too: there is so very much talk of his fingertips—“playing over my palm,” “tracing the span of my back,” “flirt[ing] with the skirt before stealing underneath,” “slipp[ing] beneath the hemline.” On their first rendezvous, his touch brings her to orgasm within seconds, and without even taking off her clothes. In the film, the book’s sex scenes—numerous and lengthy, sensual and occasionally filthy—are supplanted by tame bedroom montages. In both, there’s an emphasis on lifestyle porn: private jets, designer fitting rooms, a villa in the South of France. But the book gives actual context to her sexual escape: Soléne, a woman whose identity was stolen by marriage and motherhood, gets to travel the world and stay in luxury hotels with a man who doesn’t require any caretaking. There are no lunches to pack and no dishes to do. Sex isn’t routine or scheduled; it’s snuck in at every possible moment. The book relishes the kind of eroticism that is antithetical to domesticity—particularly domesticity that is defined by suffocating inequality. It’s no coincidence that this book went viral during the pandemic by way of a “female word-of-mouth campaign,” as Michelle Ruiz writes in Vogue. “In the throes of isolation, restlessness, and over-mothering, The Idea of You opened a portal to a glittering alternate universe,” explains Ruiz, who is a big fan of the book. The movie acknowledges this real-world hunger: After Soléne’s relationship with Hayes hits the tabloids, some fellow moms practically high-five her when she picks her daughter up from summer camp. “You are my hero,” says one. Another mom, flanked by her husband, conspiratorially asks: “Can we just trade places?” The tweaks that the film makes to the book are a reflection of the same dynamics that can make moms feel so desperate for sexual and romantic escape. Of course, motherhood and sexuality are positioned as antithetical in our culture. For a mom to be “broadly appealing,” as Showalter put it, she is expected to sacrifice her desires. The film loosens Soléne from this bind by blaming her ex-husband for the divorce and removing a sense of betraying her daughter. It has none of the daring of the book, which eroticizes the story of a mom who pursues her own desires—at the expense of her family. And yet—SPOILER ALERT—both the book and the film ultimately require maternal sacrifice. The erotic binds of motherhood can only be escaped for so long. Keep reading…And, if you haven’t already, consider upgrading to paid so that I can continue cataloging this stuff.
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The erotic binds of motherhood
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