On a recent Saturday night, the actress Molly Ringwald hosted a book party at the Crosby Hotel, in SoHo, for her first novel, “When It Happens to You.” Something incredible has happened to Ringwald: at forty-four, she has reached middle age. If you ask a high-school kid about her, she will probably say, “Yeah, that’s Amy’s mom on ‘Secret Life.’ ” (Ringwald plays the mother of Amy Juergens, the heroine of a popular ABC television series, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.”) But the kid’s parents will remember Ringwald as that soulful Everygirl with the Titian hair who embodied the travails of their own adolescence, twenty-five years ago, in films that have become cult classics: “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club,” and “Pretty in Pink.”
Many stars publish books, and a few even write them. A majority of these productions are memoirs or self-improvement manuals, and Ringwald’s own first foray into print, in 2010, was “Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family, and Finding the Perfect Lipstick.” (She wrote, “I have a theory of hair color that is not unlike my overall theory of life. There is a magical color that you have around the age of five. If you can, never stray too far from this color.”) It is fair to say that nothing in her perky olio of anecdotes and beauty tips prepares you for Ringwald’s novel. The prose is assured in its simplicity. The action, set in Los Angeles, unfolds in eight discrete stories of familial estrangement and reunion that are linked by their characters, whose fates intersect, but without contrivance. The same ordinary yet poignant catastrophe—of modern life—catches up with them all.
Ringwald’s party—a coming-out, in its way—was a low-key event, just wine and conversation, much of it literary. An older woman writer was telling a young actress in shorts and a fedora that she and Ringwald had both embarked on their careers forty years ago, “but I was thirty,” she said, “and Molly was four.” (That was only a slight exaggeration. Ringwald made her professional début at ten, in a production of Annie.) In a corner by the bar, the novelist A. M. Homes was praising Ringwald’s finesse (“not many people can advance a narrative so invisibly”) to a lesbian couple in publishing. Across the room, Touré, the versatile man of letters, who has a talk show on MSNBC, was dissecting events in the Middle East. “I just had Molly on my show,” he was saying. “It was a nice change of pace from Yemen and Libya. You can’t always be serious—not that fiction isn’t serious,” he added quickly. “But Molly and I are both Gen Xers, and she was the icon of our generation. I kept thinking of what Joan Didion said when she interviewed John Wayne: ‘Your face is more familiar to me than my husband’s.’ ”
The guest of honor arrived slightly late, dressed for cocktails, or perhaps a red carpet, in a short black lace sheath, accessorized by stilettos, with her hair in a French twist. (It is now a becoming shade of burgundy.) Her escort was a dark, suave-looking man with old-fashioned manners, who turned out to be her husband, Panio Gianopoulos, a Greek-American writer and editor whose own first novel comes out in November. The couple has an eight-year-old daughter and three-year-old twins (a boy and a girl), and they divide their time between the coasts—a pied-à-terre in the East Village and a house in Santa Monica. “Every night,” Ringwald said, “we negotiate about who gets to write the next morning.” Gianopoulos explained, “It really depends on who’s the more desperate, but I’ve been racking up days since Molly’s been on her tour.” Ringwald confessed that she dislikes writing as much as she dislikes running, “but in both cases, I enjoy having done it.” She rents space in a writers’ room in Los Angeles, she said, “because suffering together is easier than alone. But I have a limit: two hours or five hundred words, whichever comes first.”
The only hint to the author’s celebrity was an unusually lavish outlay of books on a buffet table. “They’re free, take one,” a publicist urged a guest, who promptly took two. Then Ringwald put on a pair of nerdy-looking glasses and gave a brief reading. “I’ve been writing stories almost as long as I’ve been acting,” she said later. “Mostly bad ones—I had to age into my voice. At one point, my shrink got tired of my insecurity. ‘Stop dating writers,’ she said, ‘just be one.’ ” (Ringwald’s first husband, a Frenchman, was also a writer.) “Fame has been a mixed blessing,” she concluded. “It opens doors, but it locks you into other people’s preconceptions. I’ve sometimes thought about using a pseudonym, but it’s late for that. I’ve worked too hard to become myself.”
Photograph by Panio Gianopoulos.