Our resident “neglected matron convinced she’s not worthy of love” has feelings about a recent review of Anne Hathaway’s new movie, The Idea of You.
Last Friday night I curled up on the couch with my three cats, a salad so big I ate it straight out of a mixing bowl, and the remote. Recently back from two weeks of travel—Maine, Vermont, California—I was happy to be home in Brooklyn and grateful for an evening to myself in sweatpants, under a blanket, not caring about my greasy bangs or making any plans.
“What shall we watch, my babies?” I asked my kitty crew, before remembering that The Idea of You, a fun-looking new Anne Hathaway movie, was streaming on Amazon Prime. A clip of the film had been heavily promoted to me (a 48-year-old single mom with two daughters in college) on my Instagram feed all week. I must have seen it 37 times: A young British guy (only middling in hotness, to me at least) says to Hathaway, “You’re hot, or whatever,” to which she repeats, “Hot,” and laughs. I know when I’m being demographically targeted. I was in.
If you haven’t seen the movie, Hathaway plays Solène, a single mom who just turned 40, and Nicholas Galitzine plays Hayes Campbell, the 24-year-old lead singer of a boy band that Solène’s 16-year-old daughter calls “so seventh grade.” The two have a meet-cute at Coachella, and romance ensues. The movie is based on a book by Robinne Lee, which was apparently big during the pandemic, yet I completely missed. I wasn’t too far into it before I turned to the cats and asked, “Is this movie about… me?”
OK, so Solène lives in a beautiful bungalow in L.A., and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a not-so-hip corner of Brooklyn. She owns an art gallery and a closet full of Valentino and vintage Prada, and I’m a freelance writer with a bunch of maxed-out credit cards and a medicine cabinet full of fancy skincare sent to me by PR reps. Still! We both have long brown hair and bangs, we both love a flowy skirt and an oversized blazer, we both get mistaken for our daughters’ sisters, and we both date dudes in their 20s. We are both hot. Plus, when I was in L.A. last week, my Lyft driver told me that if I move there, I should look for a place in Silver Lake, the neighborhood where Solène lives. “That’s where all the writers are,” he said. “I can see you there.” I rest my case.
By the end (this could merit a spoiler alert, but all cheesy rom-coms follow a similar formula, don’t they?), I started to think that maybe, just maybe, I might find love again one day. I remembered the warm, fizzy feeling that percolates underneath a nervous, thudding heartbeat and radiates all the way out to your toes and the tips of your fingers. I thought of my favorite poem, “Happiness” by Jane Kenyon—you weep night and day / to know that you were not abandoned / that happiness saved its most extreme form / for you alone—and tears flooded my eyes.
Maybe I’m not too old. Maybe it’s not too late, I thought—things I know intellectually, but which my bruised heart has trouble believing. Then I dried my tears, hugged the cats, and put myself to bed, happy to have been so successfully marketed to.
The next day, my friend and Jenny co-founder Megan sent a heated text to the group chat. “Wow, this story is so insulting to 40-year-old women it’s unbelievable,” she said, linking to an article on The Cut: ”Anne Hathaway Is Too Hot for The Idea of You.”
“I haven’t seen the movie but maybe we should do a response,” she wrote.
“I watched it last night and I’m afraid to read this,” I replied, not wanting my little bubble of rom-com happiness to be burst quite yet. But of course, I clicked. And then, like I was passing the site of a gruesome accident, I could not look away.
The writer, Cat Zhang (who won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Next Award for Journalists Under 30 in 2022), says Hathaway was the wrong choice to portray a 40-year-old woman whose messy divorce has left her guarded and cynical (Hathaway is 41). “Who could believe Hathaway as a neglected matron convinced she’s not worthy of love?” writes Zhang. “The actress is a world-famous beauty who descends down red carpets in latex couture. Her long brown tresses waterfall down her unblemished back like she’s a walking commercial for both TRESemmé and Neutrogena. Everywhere she goes, she leaves a trail of admirers with their mouths agape.”
Who could believe it? Me. Me! I can believe it.
I may not be world-famous, but enough people tell me I’m beautiful on a regular basis that I have no trouble believing that I leave a trail of drooling admirers in my wake. (Some of them are in my DMs right now.) And it’s not just me: I’m surrounded by gorgeous women in their 40s and 50s, all of whom regularly take my breath away with their style, humor, wisdom, and beauty. I don’t think any of us would describe ourselves as neglected matrons convinced we’re not worthy of love, but many of us are single, disheartened by the dating scene, and occasionally unsure of our loveability.
“Hathaway is so well-known for being gorgeous it’s ridiculous to extrapolate her experience, even in a make-believe context, onto the romantic plight of dejected moms,” Zhang opines. “Sure, she has children and is around the same age as Solène. But Solène is supposed to be an ordinary caretaker, and Hathaway is a movie star with unlimited access to the best skin-care products and estheticians in the country. It’s just not believable!”
“An ordinary caretaker?” Besides the fact that she also owns an art gallery, what even is that? “Dejected moms?” What are those supposed to look like? Zhang has an answer. “If the movie ever gets rebooted, the casting directors should consider… a PTA president with a soccer-mom bob,” she writes. Wow.
As it happened, I got Megan’s text, and read The Cut story, while I was at a kid’s birthday party, in the company of a few of those same gorgeous women in their 40s and 50s I mentioned above. I told them about it. “This writer is just jealous,” I joked. “She’s mad that younger guys want to sleep with us instead of women their own age. We’re hot, we’re confident, we know what men want us to do with our pinkies in bed, and we’re not afraid to do it.”
One of the dads piped up. “She’s not jealous. She’s scared. She’s not 40 yet, so she doesn’t know that women get better as they get older. They’re not thinking about dumb things. They’ve arrived. Who wants to date some 25-year-old with 25-year-old problems? Or even a 35-year-old? Confidence, vulnerability, clarity—that’s what women over 40 have. And that’s hot.”
“Can you say that again so I can write it down?” I asked, frantically making mental notes.
That evening, Megan watched the movie too, and it only added fuel to her fire (though she, too, got teary-eyed at the end)—especially after she saw the fashion choices Zhang deemed fit for a “sophisticate in her early 30s at best.” Megan, who loves clothes and often advises me on my outfit choices, took issue with the implication that women in their 40s can’t be stylish. Zhang was dumbfounded that the film’s costume designer would put a 40-year-old in “an oversize tie-dye button-down” or a “shoulder-baring maxi dress.”
“Both of those seem like totally reasonable things for a woman of any age to wear, but I guess we’re all just supposed to cover our bodies with linen sacks and call it a day?” Megan laughed. “Also, of course Solène is hot; that’s probably a prerequisite for dating a famous pop star. The movie would be much less ‘believable’ if she was the frumpy soccer mom the writer seems to think most 40 year-old-women are.”
But this is about more than just looks and clothes. In a 2020 Vogue interview that Zhang quotes, Lee says her book is about a woman “reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself, at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.” Zhang says this message is “fine,” but she is, in fact, working against it, writing all of us “depleted 40-somethings” off with her words.
Listen, I get it. I’m a writer on the internet, too. We’re all spouting off in service of those clicks. Zhang is currently getting skewered on Instagram and in the comments section of her story (“Hi it’s 2024 and moms are hot. Welcome to the MILFdom. Pay your respects.”) and I might get my share of hate for writing this. It’s part of the game. But to her, and any other woman who hasn’t yet stared down 40 candles on a birthday cake, I have one thing to say. It’s an inscription from an ancient crypt in Rome, and I think of it often: “What you are, we once were; what we are, you will be.” Just wait, baby girl. You’ll get here—if you’re lucky.
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Elizabeth Laura Nelson has been airing her dirty laundry online since she wrote an “It Happened To Me” story for the late, great xoJane. Since then she’s worked at websites including YourTango, Elite Daily, Woman’s World, and Best Life. When she was 12, she kissed the George Michael poster above her bed every night before she went to sleep.
