Back To Shore

On Goodreads the novel “The Idea of You” by Robinne Lee comes with mixed reviews, most of them good but also a few scathing negative ones. What can I say? I had a wonderful time reading it and I did not expect this story to stay with me the way it did. I expected an interesting, slightly unique, but still mostly easy-going romance, with the typical “will they? / won’t they?” and typical tropes of roadblocks but still leading up to a happily ever after. And in parts it is exactly that and in so many parts it so very much isn’t. 

The premise is easily explained: Solene is a 39 year olds divorcee in LA, who takes her teenage daughter to a meet & greet with the boyband August Moon, where she meets 20 years old Hayes Campbell, the leading male band member. The attraction is instant and then a flirt turns into one-night-stand turns into a fling turns into a secret affair turns into a public relationship turns into…. 

Unrealistic premise? A little bit maybe, but I allow that in a novel more often than not. One thing that made me roll my eyes a bit and kept me from giving this five stars was that this attraction and romance could only work, because both Solene and Hayes were not the typical regular American middleclass mum or boy in a boyband, but more sophisticated. Solene’s parents are French professors at ivy league colleges, she runs a high-class art gallery in LA, jet-sets to various art fairs and events all over the world. Hayes and all the other boys in the band come from a rather posh background, public school, cultured, bound for Oxford or Cambridge and all that. Sometimes it all felt a bit too posh, the places they meet, the events they go to, the world they move in.

Another aspect that turned me off a tiny bit was that towards the end there was a bit much of complaining about sexism and misogyny and how women still have it harder in so many aspects of life. I agree and I get it, but I didn’t need it shoved down my throat as much as it felt like in last half or so of this story.

Apart from all of that though? OMG, this story broke my heart into tiny little pieces. Because spoiler alert: Of course there wasn’t a happily ever after. There never could have been as much as I’d rooted for them as both characters grew on me quickly. I rooted for Solene to follow through on the mutual attraction, because no-one would bat an eyelash if the gender roles were reversed and it were a 40 year old man hooking up with someone like Posh Spice. In the beginning even I caught myself thinking for millisecond “Is this weird? Does that feel icky?”. Deep-rooted internal misogyny at play here. They were two consenting adults. That’s all that matters. 

I loved that at the heart of the underlying and ongoing conflict wasn’t solely the age difference, but the fact, that a relationship between a guy in a super-successful (boy)band with fans camping outside the hotel and millions of followers on social media and a woman who is not part of the entertainment industry (art gallery or not) is doomed to fail. These kind of pop and rock stars lead such a different life and to me the story excels at portraying that realistically. I’m old enough to have witnessed the public and media frenzy about bands in the past decades. The current Robbie Williams documentary on Netflix also gave me some idea of that that life is like.

Here it was the paparazzi capturing the secret relationship after all, the unwanted attention Solene receives once the story gets out. The hate mail from rabid fans, the death threats. But also the bullying Isabelle, the teenage daughter has to endure once the story breaks, which is a big part of why Solene ends the relationship. There is one moment towards the end where the age difference comes into play quite starkly, when Solene encounters a crying underaged girl in the hotel hallway in the middle of the night. The girl had lied about her age to hook up with one of the other band members. Solene gets into full mother-mode to help the girl, while Hayes only worries about possible implication for the band and himself if this comes out. And both sides are equally valid from their respective points of view and where they both are in their lives at that time. And in the end that was the clincher: Hayes – as much as he was in love with Solene – still had so much to learn and to grow to be able to become the man he could be.

I will re-read parts of this story tonight. That’s how much my mind is still reeling with it. Oh and the fact that I was fantasizing about what I would have loved to see happen after. Not in a happy-end for them together, but a happy-end for either of them a decade later and both of them acknowledging what lead them to this. My mind was spinning with picturing elaborate scenarios to the extent that I decided to not just keep daydreaming about it, but trying to write it down. Fanfic for a novel? Never done that before, but that won’t stop me. Wish me luck…

This morning when I checked Twitter for the first time in a few days I saw this

Divulge your favourite Operation Mincemeat lyric 🎶⬇️

— Operation Mincemeat (@mincemeatlive) December 8, 2023

I tried to narrow it down and sort of categorize them. My picks also might change as soon as tomorrow depending on my mood, but here we go:

My favourite witty ones for their word play and rhythm and audacity

For fortune favours bravery
And a fortune’s what I’ve got

Look up victory in the dictionary
There’s a picture there of me

Foreigners aren’t great coroners, see
And no-one in Spain is as clever as me

My favourite one for modern-day relevance

You think we’re badass? You ain’t seen nothing
Democracy, you won’t see us coming

The ones I could/can relate to the most, both from “Dead in the Water”, which my ” ‘I Want’ Song” as much as it is Charles’.

But it’s part of my biology to start with an apology

One day I’ll metamorphosize
The scales shall tumble from their eyes
And thus shall end this wretched old routine

And then there are the many many inspirational ones

But life is much more pleasant when you’re living in the present

It’s no life if you’re forgetting to live

and of course

Set your hearts to the horizon
Leave your fears upon the shore

Thanks to my tendency to do long write-ups for events I loved, I knew there was at least one memorable lyric which was lost over time. For good reason probably, but I still have fond memories of it, because it stayed with me for a while. From a previous version of “All the Ladies”

Stage a coup
For your mothers and your sisters too

And while I’m at: Can I have moment of remembrance for “Let Me Die in Velvet” and the audacity to rhyme pretentious with trenches ? That definitely would have made this list 😉

shoutout to my fellow cute SAD girlies who will now be moving through lead until April – this WILL not last forever! They CANNOT pass a law about it !

— Natasha Hodgson (@NatashaHodgson) October 30, 2023

I don’t know if it’s the constant rain or whatever but I’m feeling this so hard this year. And I never really used to or at least not to this degree. But the fact that it’s getting light so late and dark so early is properly messing with me at the moment. It might be a slight post-COVID effect. Maybe something hormonal? Either way, I don’t like it.

Music #01 | I went to see The Lottery Winners in Cologne on Tuesday.

While I was driving there during heavy rain and typical rush-hour traffic, I was questioning the decision for quite a bit. After just few minutes in the car in fact, because the motorway was jammend and my sat-nav sent me along streets I never had to drive on before. Up and down the hills, in the dark and heavy rain. But I made it to Cologne safely and in good time, so all was well. It was a 200 cap venue and sadly there were only about 50 people in attendance. I felt so sorry for the band who were great and made the most of it and engaged the audience and we all had fun, I think. I chatted with some of the band at the merch table afterwards, which was lovely. I joked that I’d like to take a photo with them now, before they get too big for that kind of fan interaction. Which I honestly think they might manage to in the UK anyway.

Music #02 | Jess Guise released a new song on Friday: “Wish”. It’s about how she wishes her dad – who had passed away when she was 18 – would still be around and I think anyone who has lost a parent too early in life can relate to what she’s singing about here.

She had shared the song via her Patreon page a few times before, so I knew what to expect and how I’d react to the song. With a few tears of course. Even more so this time, because it’s a polished version with full instrumentation and you can’t turn that up in most emotionally fraught (for me) moment and not expect me to react with tears. When Jess had released “Brother in Arms” – another song about that experience – in 2020 I wrote a long post about how much I could relate and how much it moved me. How it made me remember / work through some of the stuff I hadn’t thought of for the longest time. My dad passed away when I was 14. That was 34 years ago. I wrote this back in 2020:

You would assume I’m over it. And I am. But also… I’m not. I don’t think you ever really ‘get over it’, because losing a parent at that age is such a traumatic experience, which shapes you like not much else. And to me that is what this song is all about. I’m now at a time in my life, where I only very occasionally think of my dad and this loss anymore. That’s why hearing my whole experience described in such fitting words all of sudden and quite unprepared absolutely floored me.

My own blog in November 2020

I’m not going to another long review post of “Wish” now. But I thought it’s worth noting that once again some lyrics absolute took my breath away, because they mirror my own experience and emotions to a T. Something I haven’t thought of in decades. Did I repress it? Did I ever even share it with my friends, once I had managed to talk about my dead dad in any capacity? I don’t remember.

I wish I could apologize for the teenager I was before you died

“Wish” – Jess Guise, 2023

The evening before my dad died from cardiac arrest, he and I had gotten into an argument over something silly. The TV? I don’t recall the details. I do remember lying on my bed crying the indignant tears of a teenage girl. For some strange reason I have a vivid memory of my mom sitting on the bed next to me trying to smooth things over and to calm me down. I don’t think I saw my dad or talked to him that evening again. We definitely didn’t have any kind of “clearing the air / make up” moment. I didn’t see him before I went to school the next morning either. Around noon I got home from school to the news that he had passed away.

I don’t have any clear memory of how this “not making up” affected me in the days, weeks, months, years after. I vaguely remember that a sort of guilty feeling crept up every once in a while to haunt me for a bit. Like I wrote in 2020 we definitely would have benefited from grief counselling, but we never got any of that. It was a different time back then and we all muddled through somehow. At some point with the passing years the guilty memory was replaced or at least amended with the belief that he didn’t hold that stupid little argument against me. He wasn’t resentful and I know he loved me. Of course I wish we wouldn’t have left things unspoken between us. Just like I wish for so many of the other things Jess sings about in this song. I guess that will never ever change.

Prompts on Hold | I had a few more rambling thoughts to share. About Social Media. About “Zen-doodling” (that’s what I’ll call it for now). Dragging up memories about my dad and all that put me in a sentimental mood now and I can’t be bothered to write much more.