In Hoover’s novel, a young Lily (played by Isabela Ferrer in the film) and Atlas (Alex Neustaedter) fall in love while watching Ellen and Finding Nemo after school. DeGeneres is such a comforting figure in Lily’s life that she addresses entries in her childhood diary to the comedian, and later gives her daughter the middle name Dory, after DeGeneres’s forgetful animated fish. Atlas is equally enamoured — at one point, he gives Lily a signed copy of DeGeneres’s memoir as a sign of his love and tells her upon rekindling their romance: “You can stop swimming now, Lily. We finally reached the shore.”
It was shrewd to cut this whole subplot, strange and superfluous as it is — not to mention the fact that the toxic workplace allegations that have emerged against DeGeneres since the book’s publication have chipped away at the comedian’s feel-good effect. But the film still nods to this element of the novel: In one scene, Atlas and Lily watch Ellen together while speaking about the future, and a stuffed Finding Nemo toy can be spotted in her daughter’s nursery.
The ending — at first, anyway
In both the novel and film, Lily tells Ryle she plans to divorce him while he cradles their newborn daughter, Emerson — named for the older brother that Ryle accidentally shot and killed while playing with a gun as children. They agree that if their daughter were ever in the same situation as Ryle has placed Lily, he would also want her to leave her partner. The film also ends with a domestic violence resource hotline. Lily and Ryle’s rocky relationship as co-parents (an arrangement some have also criticised) plays out in Hoover’s 2022 sequel, It Starts With Us.
But according to screenwriter Christy Hall, the moment in the hospital after Ryle leaves — when Lily tells her daughter, “It ends with us” — was originally omitted from the script. “As a screenwriter, a big no-no is you don’t want any character to ever say the title of the film,” Hall told Entertainment Weekly. (The Idea of You would beg to differ.) “So in my initial draft…I had her say the line, ‘It stops here, between you and me,’ blah, blah, blah. I didn’t have her say, ‘It ends with us.’”
Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin
The group of fans invited to read the early draft were unanimously opposed. “That was a really funny moment,” said Hall, “because sometimes they’d be split on things, but that one was resounding, 100 percent out of 100 percent were like, ‘How dare you?!’’ and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I must be absolved of this sin.’”
This article originally appeared in Vanity Fair.