This season we’re exploring creativity in midlife. That electric, unpredictable, often inconvenient force that resurfaces just as everything else in your life is demanding your attention. For many women, this chapter brings a hunger to express, create, and feel deeply… even while navigating brain fog, hot flashes, insomnia, or a sneaky sense that time is running out. What happens when your creativity doesn’t quiet down, but starts to boil up? Enter my guest today, Robinne Lee.

About Robinne Lee:

Robinne is a Jamaican-Chinese writer, actress, and producer, a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School. She’s spent the past three decades building an impressive career in film and television, with standout roles in Hitch, Seven Pounds, 13 Going on 30, Being Mary Jane, and the Fifty Shades franchise. But she’s perhaps best known today as the author of the breakout novel The Idea of You—an international bestseller, translated into over a dozen languages, and adapted into an Amazon Studios movie starring Anne Hathaway. She’s currently working on her anxiously awaited second novel, due out in 2026.

If you don’t already know the book, here’s the premise: a nearly 40-year-old single mom and art gallerist unexpectedly falls into a passionate relationship with the 20-year-old lead singer of the world’s biggest boy band. Yes, it’s erotically delicious. But it’s also a daring, tender, and deeply honest exploration of what it means to feel alive, desirous, and sexually empowered at midlife—a time when society often expects women to shrink and fade.

In our conversation, we dive into:

• How Paris—with its beauty, history, and seasonal sensuality—awakens her curiosity and creativity.
• Why fantasy isn’t just escapism, but a portal to our hidden, electric selves
• How Robinne developed a deep understanding of intimacy and seduction, long before living it out
• How writing about the complexity of women’s lives is a quiet act of rebellion
• And how midlife sharpens our hunger to live fully, unapologetically, right now

We also get into the audiobook version of The Idea of You (which Robinne narrates herself). It’s masterful—she inhabits the characters of Solène and Hayes so completely, it’s like being inside the story with them. Honestly, if you’re tempted to skip the book and just watch the movie… don’t. Listen to the audiobook. Trust me.

And if today’s subject stirs something in you—if you’re feeling your own creative fire asking for space—just remember: this is the work I support my clients with through my coaching practice.

Connect with Me:

•Book a discovery call at www.zevabellel.com

•Subscribe to my Substack: On Becoming

•Email me: [email protected]

•Leave me a voice message on Speakpipe

Credits: Artwork Jessie Kanelos Weiner; Editing Matthew Jordan; Music © Fabrice Fortin

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