Beware, spoilers for ‘The Idea of Having You’, both the book and the movie!
To the author of ‘The Idea of Having You’, Robinne Lee, “he would have liked to participate” in the film adaptation of his 2017 novel – which is about the relationship between Solène Marchand, a 39-year-old art gallery owner, and a boy band singer named Hayes Campbell – or so he said to ELLE USA. “There were a lot of important story points that weren’t included in the adaptation,” he says. Perhaps this lack of participation explains why the film has a different ending than the book.
In the film, Solène (a dazzling Anne Hathaway) and Hayes (an endearing Nicolas Galitzine) decide to break up after seeing how the reaction to their romance begins to affect Solène’s daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), at school. But the Prime Video film leaps forward at the end and shows Hayes waltzing again in Solène’s gallery five years after their breakup. This eager to resume the relationship where they left her, especially now that they are both older and Izzy is in college. The argument here, of course, is that A 29-year-old Hayes with a 44-year-old woman is less controversial than a 24-year-old Hayes with a 39-year-old woman, and therefore the risk of social ostracism is lower.
We don’t know if this ending would be realistic in the world of celebrities and that’s why it is completely different in the book. In the novel, Hayes is 20 years old and has not reached the legal drinking age in the United States (Solène, as in the film, is 39). When Izzy’s classmates harass her because of her mother’s relationship, Solène makes the decision to break up. She tells Hayes: “‘I can’t do this to Isabelle. I can’t do this to myself.’ I can’t follow you around the world. I’m not twenty years old. I have a career, a child and responsibilities. And I have other people who need me.'”
The book ends with Hayes fighting to stay together, and Solène hurting him. in a desperate attempt to cut ties:
“You loved me,” he told her. “You loved me. You said you loved me. Why are you doing this?”
And then I realized there was only one way to truly let him go. “Maybe it wasn’t you,” I said. “Maybe it was the idea of having you.”
The Idea of You: Now a major film starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine on Prime Video
The Idea of You: Now a major film starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine on Prime Video
The ending of the book upset many readers, because they thought it was a traditional romance novel with a happy ending. But Lee told ELLE USA that he never intended for ‘The Idea of Having You’ to be a regular romance novel. but rather contemporary women’s fiction.
“I was really surprised when my publisher sold it more as a romance,” Lee said, “and then the readers who came to me expecting it to be a romance wanted more, like, ‘Where’s my happy ending? And are you going to write a sequel?” And he continues: “I said: ‘No, this is a unique story. It is a story. “Not all love stories end happily.”
For that reason, among others, Lee considers the film “a completely different entity” from the book. “I feel like my book is my baby and this is its second cousin,” she says. “There is some DNA, but not really.”
WATCH MOVIE IN PRIME VIDEO
){kind=link}