What to Read if You Liked Babygirl (and even if you hated it)

Literary novels featuring an older woman and younger man, plus age-gap memoirs

As you probably already know, Babygirl is the film written and directed by Halina Reijn, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, in which Kidman plays a CEO who gets involved with a young intern. When I searched for “books like Babygirl movie,” Google returned dozens of romance novels—including Anyone But You by Jennifer Cruise and The Idea of You by Robinne Lee—but only a handful of literary or mainstream novels.

Watch the Babygirl trailer

Nothing against the romance genre, but why must the subject of an age gap in which the woman is older be relegated to a single niche, while stories of relationships between older men and younger women have long been the norm in literary fiction and in film?

Literary Age-Gap Fiction

In literary and mainstream fiction, the most popular title featuring an older woman is The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves tops the Goodreads list. But this search result is misleading, because the “young man” in both novels is only 17 when he meets the female lead—not a man at all, but a minor!

According to reviewers, the young man in On the Island is an adult by the time the romantic relationship begins, but still…this just gets back to the larger question of extremes. Older-men/younger-women relationships in film and literature happen on your average Tuesday in anytown USA, while the reverse is justified only by extraordinary circumstances, like being marooned for life on a deserted island.

An exception is Susan Minot’s smart, beautiful novel Don’t Be a Stranger (2024), in which 52-year-old Ivy Cooper falls into a passionate affair with musician Ansel Fleming. Ivy is a writer with a few books to her name, divorced, raising her young son in New York City. Fleming, who is in his thirties, lost seven years of his life to incarceration. Ivy begins the relationship thinking she can’t get hurt, that it will just be an enjoyable fling, but soon discovers that her attachment to Ansel is as fierce as her lover’s determination not to be emotionally attached.

The writing is as sharp and crystalline as one expects from Susan Minot, and it has that raw edge of desire fans of her earlier books, including Lust and Other Stories, will find familiar. I loved that this book involves an age gap without being all about the age gap. The defining characteristic of Ivy and Ansel’s relationship, beyond physical passion and intellectual companionship, is that they are miles apart in experience and in what they want from a relationship. As Ansel tells her, “I like fucking you, but I don’t need it.” Ivy, on the other hand, is utterly consumed by Ansel, to the point that her work and her friendships suffer, though the one thing she continues to do with deep concentration and devotion is take care of her young son. This is a novel about limerence in which the main character is acutely aware of the pit she’s falling into. Highly recommended.

Of course, if you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of All Fours, by

Miranda July

, which features a forty-four year old woman obsessed with a thirty-one year old man—the sort of age gap no one blinks an eye at if the genders are reversed. As with Minot’s novel, July’s isn’t really about the age gap at all. The greatest chasm between the narrator and her would-be lover is class (she’s a minor celebrity, he works at the Hertz counter). En route to receive a literary award across the country, the narrator encounters the Hertz fellow just a few miles outside of the town where she lives with her husband and young child, checks into a roadside motel, and proceeds to blow her prize money on redecorating her room. This novel about a brief romantic obsession is sharp, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable.

If flash fiction is your thing, you might enjoy the story Rio Nido Forever, by Ivy Finnegan, which you can read here on Substack.

Memoirs featuring an older woman and younger man

For readers seeking age gap memoirs, there is The Young Man by Nobel Prize recipient Annie Ernaux, which at a slim 64 pages, including a bio and notes from the author, is more a personal essay than full-fledged memoir. (I’ve previously written about Ernaux’s erotically charged nonfiction here).

There is also The Naked Truth by Leslie Morgan, in which a recently divorced woman on the cusp of fifty, recovering from a sexless marriage, decides to take five lovers in a year. The experiment begins with a man twenty years her junior whom she meets by chance in an airport (according to Morgan, airports are the place to meet men). Although the writing at times feels wooden, the memoir does present an experience that defies the common narrative of the older woman aggressively pursuing a man. In Morgan’s case, it is usually the men who instigate the relationship.

More Thoughts on Babygirl

In interviews, the director has called Babygirl a response to Eyes Wide Shut, which focused on the fantasies of Kidman’s co-star, Tom Cruise. Reijn wanted to focus on Kidman’s character instead.

“I want to know, ‘What if she would’ve gone and actually would’ve lived her fantasy?’ That’s what this is — my answer, playfully and humbly, to the male Eyes Wide Shut…”

Sounds intriguing. But I look forward to a time when the mere thought of an older woman with a younger man isn’t considered so…well, groundbreaking. The older-man-younger-woman dynamic is so expected and accepted that the respective ages of the male and female leads in such narratives often go unmentioned. Yet relationships involving an older woman are almost always considered subversive, as in Babygirl; or fraught with danger, as in the electrifying Paul Verhoeven film Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert; or transactional, as in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande or Saltburn.

I loved Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, and I will watch anything with Isabelle Huppert (I even dragged my husband to the very long one-woman Isabelle Huppert period piece, Mary Said What She Said, at Theatre de la Ville in Paris in 2019—see the standing ovation above). But why are there so few films in which an age gap involving an older woman is neither subversive nor transactional? And so few novels outside the romance genre in which the age gap exists in ordinary rather than extreme circumstances? What if relationships between older women and younger men were treated with the same nonchalance, in film and literary fiction, as the reverse?

Of course, the imbalance may simply be a byproduct of the fact that older-man/younger-woman relationships are much more prevalent in society. In my family and friend circle, I know several couples in which the man is slightly older—my own husband, whom I met when in grad school, is six years older than I am. When we met, he was thirty and I was twenty-four, although he frequently reminds me that I implied I was twenty-six and he wouldn’t have dated me if he’d been aware of my real age. And to be fair, if I’d been single at thirty, I wouldn’t have dated a man six years my junior. By my mid-twenties I was looking for my life partner, while many men at that age are likely to be looking for something less permanent. Maybe film is simply reflecting the kinds of relationships we see around us.

On the other hand, we often go to movies and read books to enter a different world. Is the older-woman/younger man scenario so taboo that even filmmakers are reluctant to go there?

Tom Cruise can save the earth from aliens, but not with someone his own age: in Edge of Tomorrow, Emily Blunt was 31 and Cruise was 51. There’s a 39-year age gap between Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment, a 28-year old age gap between Emma Stone and Colin firth in Magic in the Moonlight, 26 years between Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets. The list is very long. You could create a whole subreddit of films in which a twenty-something Margot Robbie is involved with a forty-something leading man. Imagine any of these age gaps in the reverse; the movie would be about the age gap itself, and everything else would merely be subtext.

My son, who admits he is not the target audience for the film, actually walked out of the theater after ten minutes and went into the showing for A Complete Unknown instead. But the A Complete Unknown theater was empty—apparently they hadn’t sold a single ticket—so the projector shut off a few minutes and he returned to Babygirl. He didn’t like that Babygirl glorified infidelity, and he thought the message was way off. Kidman experienced some sort of self-actualization and therefore, the film seemed to be saying, the terrible damage she did to others was somehow justified. (By the way husband and son and I did end up seeing A Complete Unknown in a packed theater two days later, and all three of us loved it.)

After seeing the film, I felt the same. It had some great scenes, and the chemistry between Kidman and Dickinson was fantastic, but the protagonist was painfully lacking in self-awareness, and the film’s message ultimately didn’t resonate with me. That said, Baby Girl is worth watching for the fun of it. Kidman’s trademark sexual tension is alive and well.

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Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books of fiction, including the psychological thriller The Marriage Pact and the missing-child mystery The Year of Fog.