The Stories We Tell Ourselves, and the Stories We Are Asked to Believe

I started watching The Idea of You expecting to like it. I understood immediately why people loved it. It has all the ingredients designed to create an emotional response: an older woman, a younger man, an unexpected attraction, celebrity, beautiful locations, longing, separation, and the possibility of finding each other again. There are moments that work, particularly the quieter scenes between Solène and Hayes, and the music. The idea of a woman in her forties discovering that she can still experience an overwhelming romantic connection is inherently interesting.

And yet, somewhere while I was watching it, I became increasingly irritated. At first I thought it was because I had seen this story before.

Years ago I watched The Rebound, and I loved it. I remember loving it because it felt real. There was a real age gap, she had children, and when they fell in love, the reality of their different stages of life eventually caught up with them, believably. The two people actually seemed to know each other. Their circumstances created the conflict rather than the plot repeatedly manufacturing reasons for them to break apart.

So when I watched The Idea of You, I kept thinking about The Rebound. The similarities were specific enough that I wondered whether Robinne Lee had ever seen it, or whether it had influenced the book. I cannot establish that, and I am not going to pretend I can. The book was published in 2017 and The Rebound was released in 2009, so the chronology makes the possibility conceivable. What bothered me was that I could not understand why almost nobody seemed to be making the connection.

That comparison, though, was only the beginning of what was bothering me. The real problem was that The Rebound gave me people, while The Idea of You gave me a fantasy.

That distinction matters to me because I am a story consumer as much as I am a storyteller. I remember stories: characters, motivations, contradictions, the things people say and the things they do not say. I am interested in why people behave the way they do, what they believe about themselves, and what might actually be happening underneath what everyone believes.

That is probably why I respond so strongly to morally complicated fiction. I love morally complicated characters. I do not need characters to be good people. I do not even need to like them. A character can be cruel, selfish, manipulative, deluded, or deeply damaged and still be fascinating to me, provided I can understand the internal logic that makes the character believable. What I need from the writer is a little distance between the character’s reality and mine.

A character can believe he is a hero while the reader can see he is a monster. A character can believe he is acting out of love while the reader can see he is exercising control. A character can believe he is protecting someone while the reader can see he is actually taking away their autonomy. A character can hold a belief for years and then encounter something that forces him to question it.

That gap is where I find the story.

The writer does not have to tell me what to think. The character’s behaviour, language, contradictions, and consequences can give me enough information to work it out for myself.

That is also why I have no problem reading stories from the perspective of people who have done terrible things. I have written from the perspective of a serial killer who thinks of himself as a hero. If I write that character properly, he cannot walk around thinking, “I am the villain and I know that everything I am doing is wrong.” He has to believe his own version of reality. He has to construct a moral framework that makes sense to him. That does not mean I am condoning him.

Understanding a person’s internal logic is not the same thing as agreeing with it.

This is one of the reasons I found The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair so interesting. The relationship between Harry and Nola is deeply uncomfortable. She is fifteen. He is an adult. There is a huge imbalance between them, and the story gives us plenty of reasons to question Harry’s understanding of what he calls love.

At the same time, Harry genuinely believes he loves her. Nola genuinely believes she loves him. He hides it because he knows how it will look. He imagines taking her away. He believes he is protecting her, and he believes he understands her. The story allows us to enter that reality without requiring us to accept it.

That is a very different thing from romanticising the relationship. In fact, one of the things I took from the story was the possibility that Harry did not really understand Nola as a person at all. Perhaps he loved an idea of her. Perhaps he loved his muse, the way an artist can become deeply attached to the image of someone without ever understanding the person behind the image. That interpretation makes the relationship more disturbing rather than less, because Harry’s feelings can be completely genuine while his understanding of what he is doing remains profoundly flawed. Genuine feeling and accurate understanding are not the same thing, and a story that lets you see the gap between them is doing something harder than either condemning Harry or excusing him.

I am also drawn to stories that sit inside an age gap, including ones where the older person is a man and the younger person is a woman. Some of those stories are genuinely about love. Some are grooming wearing the costume of love, and a good story lets you see the costume even when the character inside it cannot. The age gap alone does not tell me what kind of story I am in. What tells me is the circumstance, the power relationship, the behaviour, and whether each person actually has the ability to choose.

A story can also make the reader initially believe a relationship is romantic and then gradually reveal that something much darker is happening. That can be incredibly powerful, because the reader experiences the same confusion the characters experience. The writer is examining the relationship rather than instructing the reader how to feel about it. That is the distinction I kept coming back to while watching The Idea of You.

There was a genuinely interesting story sitting underneath all of the celebrity fantasy. An older woman has an established life, a career, a child, and an identity that exists independently of romantic relationships. A younger man enters that life and genuinely loves her. The relationship becomes difficult because society reacts differently to an older woman with a younger man, and the woman has to confront the expectations placed on her because she is a mother, because she is older, because she is a woman, and because she has apparently reached an age at which society expects her romantic life to become secondary. That could have been an extraordinary story. Instead, I felt the story kept returning to the same underlying assumption: Solène is a mother first, and everything else about her has to be negotiated around that identity. That is where I became genuinely frustrated.

The daughter becomes part of the mechanism through which the relationship has to end. The public reaction becomes part of the mechanism. The age gap becomes part of the mechanism. Hayes offers to change his life, and that becomes another source of conflict. Eventually they separate, and then five years later the film offers the possibility of reunion.

I kept thinking that the story had so many opportunities to ask a much more interesting question.

What happens when a woman loves her child completely and also refuses to believe that motherhood means the end of her own life?

What happens when the younger man understands the consequences of his choices and decides for himself what he wants?

What happens when a daughter eventually understands that her mother is a whole person whose life does not end where her childhood begins?

Those questions would have given the story much more room to breathe.

The daughter could have been conflicted. She could have been frightened, embarrassed, in need of time. All of that would have been believable. What I found difficult was the way the daughter’s distress became such a decisive mechanism for the mother’s sacrifice, without the story fully exploring what the daughter actually understood about her mother’s life.

Children grow. Their understanding changes. They eventually become adults and look back at the decisions their parents made. There is real material there.

Imagine the daughter finding out years later that her mother had given up the relationship because she thought she was protecting her. Imagine the daughter being furious with her mother for making that decision on her behalf. Imagine her saying, “I was a teenager. I was upset. I needed time. I never asked you to give up your life.” That would have been a story I would have understood. It would also have been a story about women.

Because women are repeatedly asked to make sacrifices that are treated as natural consequences of being mothers. We are expected to absorb the discomfort. We are expected to protect everyone else. We are expected to understand everyone else’s needs and then call that love.

There is something deeply interesting about the fact that an older woman with a younger man is often treated as a social problem in a way that an older man with a younger woman is not. We have seen that double standard for generations. The cultural response to women ageing, to female sexuality, desirability, and romantic agency, is still very different from the response to men doing the same things.

A story could take that contradiction seriously. It could allow the woman to confront it, to be angry about it, to question whether the social discomfort around her relationship is actually about protecting anyone, or whether it is simply discomfort with a woman occupying a position society has historically reserved for men. That is the kind of story I would want to read.

And perhaps this is why I reacted so strongly to The Idea of You. I realised I was not actually looking for a more complicated romance. I was looking for a story that trusted me enough to perceive the contradictions myself. I want to see a character believe something and then watch life challenge that belief. That is how people actually change, and I know this because I have changed.

There were things I believed when I was younger that I would reject completely today. There were situations that made me uncomfortable long before I had the language to understand why. I grew up with assumptions about women, relationships, family, and what women should want. At various points in my life I accepted things I now recognise differently.

I remember a conversation with my sister when Amisha Patel said she had not been given enough screen time in Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai. At the time, we genuinely could not understand what she was complaining about. She had been given opportunities to dance and act, she looked beautiful, she was part of the romance, and we essentially thought, what more could she want? I look back at that version of myself now and I can see how much I was missing.

The change did not happen because someone wrote a character who suddenly announced the correct feminist position and expected me to adopt it. It happened because life gave me experiences that challenged the framework I had inherited. I became uncomfortable with things I could not initially explain. Eventually I understood what I was seeing, found the language for it, and changed. That is the kind of transformation I believe in.

People can be wrong. People can learn. People can change.

A person who holds a deeply prejudiced belief can encounter something that makes that belief impossible to maintain. A person who has caused harm can understand what they have done and genuinely change. Someone who has committed a terrible crime can accept punishment, develop remorse, and become a different person. I can accept all of that in fiction.

What I cannot accept is being asked to reinterpret terrible behaviour as romantic simply because the story has decided the character is now a hero.

That is where Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania lost me. I saw a man behaving in ways I found frightening and controlling, including the idea of kidnapping a woman because she had broken his heart. Then the story moved toward treating him as the romantic hero. People around me could watch the same story and find it charming. That kind of transformation does not work for me, because the character has not earned it.

People can change. The story has to show me the change.

The same principle applies in stories about prejudice. Years ago I read a post, a father writing about his own son coming out as gay. He was a doctor, an educated, middle-aged man, and he had grown up with his own assumptions. Instead of remaining inside those assumptions, he researched. He learned. He confronted what he believed. Eventually he understood that his son’s sexual orientation was not something his son had chosen. That is believable to me. The father did not become a different person because his son came out as gay. He became different because he sought information, explored his own beliefs and conditioning, and changed his understanding. That is character development, and it is also what I want from morally complicated fiction.

I do not need the writer to make a morally complicated character morally uncomplicated for me. I do not need a serial killer to become sympathetic before I can understand them. I do not need an abusive character to become secretly good before I can enter their perspective.

I can accept a morally terrible character as a character. I can understand them. I can even write them.

What I need is for the story to know the difference between understanding a character and endorsing them.

A writer can enter the mind of a murderer without defending murder. A writer can enter the mind of an abuser without defending abuse. A writer can write from the perspective of someone who believes he is a hero while allowing the reader to see the gap between that belief and reality.

That gap is where I find the complexity. It is also where I find the reader’s intelligence.

I do not want the author to hand me a moral compass and tell me which direction to face. I want the author to give me enough of the world, enough of the characters, enough of their contradictions and consequences, that I can work it out for myself. That is probably the clearest thing I have learned about myself as a reader through all of this.

I love morally complicated characters. I love characters who are wrong. I love characters who believe they are right when everyone else can see they are wrong. I love characters who change, provided I can understand why they changed. I love stories where society believes one thing and the reader gradually understands something else.

What I have very little patience for is bad plotting.

I want consequences to grow out of character and circumstance. I want transformation to have a cause. I want relationships to develop through the people involved, rather than through a series of convenient events designed to move the story toward its predetermined ending.

Most of all, I want the writer to trust me.

Give me the character’s reality. Give me the reality around them. Give me the contradictions. Then let me see the gap. That is where the story becomes mine as a reader, and that is the kind of space I want to create as a writer.

It is the space The Idea of You never quite let me into. Not because Solène and Hayes were not worth the time, but because the story kept deciding for me what their age gap meant, instead of showing me and stepping back.