Molly Ringwald became a star for her roles in a beloved triumvirate of mid-'80s teenage movies: “Sixteen Candles,†“The Breakfast Club†and “Pretty in Pink.†Now 44, she continues to act and is also focused on a career as an author. In 2010, she published “Getting the Pretty Back.†She called that effort “a kind of entertaining, anecdotal style guide.†Her new book is “When It Happens to You,†a novel told in stories centered around Phillip and Greta, a couple whose marriage is foundering. In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Ringwald discussed the appeal of flawed characters, advice she got from Bret Easton Ellis and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
How young we re you when you first felt an urge to write stories? Can you connect it at all to the urge you felt to act?
I have always been drawn to writing fiction and have done it for as long as I can remember, dating back to grade school, but I probably started writing in earnest in my late teens. Both writing and acting require an ability to understand character - and then recreate it. I also tend to “act†the characters I'm writing to see if they resonate with me, if the dialogue sounds real.
By all accounts, it seems like you have a happy family life. There's a lot of emotional tumult in these stories. Is your fiction rooted in previous experience or is your imagination just drawn to darker themes?
My imagination tends to be drawn toward flawed people because I believe that our flaws are what make us human. Our struggle to be happy or to find our way back to a kind of happiness is something that anybody alive has most likely grappled with at some point in his or her life. My characters embody that struggle. It reminds me of something Joseph Campbell said in “The Hero With a Thousand Faces†about the duality of good and evil, light and darkness: “The best we can do is lean toward the light.†It's something that I kept coming back to as I was writing the stories.
When did you first start writing them? And did you plan this to be a “novel in stories†from the start, or did you just find yourself returning to familiar characters in the stories as you wrote them?
I started writing “When It Happens to You†in August 2010. I had originally intended to write a collection of connected stories around the subject of betrayal, which I liked as a focus because of its universality. There are so many ways in which we betray ourselves and others, and the conflict between intention and execution in our lives lends itself to dramatic situations. I chose to begin the book with a marital bet rayal, because it is so archetypal, but after I had created the troubled marriage of Greta and Phillip, I wanted to explore further, to find out how they had gotten to this difficult place. In the process of doing this, I began to build up the lives of some of the other characters.
There was an article recently making the rounds (and making waves) online that had as its sub-headline: “Does a female novelist need to have experienced motherhood to truly understand human emotions?†Kids play an important role in these stories, and you have three children. Do you think being a mother is an important precursor to writing well about it?
I don't think being a mother is essential to being able to write believable mothers, but I can't deny that it can give the writer an edge in terms of the more prosaic details of life with children - the sounds and the smells. I also think it can be tempting to idealize or mythologize parenthood in a way that you can't when you are i n the middle of it. But I think it is ludicrous to suggest that only mothers can write credibly of motherhood. It's like arguing Dostoevsky needed to commit murder in order to write “Crime and Punishment.†Stephen Crane wrote one of the most well-known war novels of all time despite having never personally experienced combat.
Who are some of the writers you most admire or feel inspired or influenced by?
The writers that inspired me the most as a young person are the same writers that resonate with me today. I discovered Raymond Carver as a teenager, and although I don't think you would necessarily be able to see his influence in my writing, he has always moved me and deeply inspired me as a writer - the same with Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert and Georges Perec. In the past decade, I've come to admire Carol Shields, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Franzen, Robin Black, Lauren Groff and most recently Jami Attenberg , whose [upcoming] “The Middlesteins†is a marvel. I have always believed that the only way to be a good writer is to be a great reader.
Do you have hopes of turning the book into a film or do you plan to keep the forms completely separate?
The book was very much conceived in prose form, but the characters have not let go of me yet. I would very much like to adapt it for film and have been thinking seriously about the best way to do it. Writing and directing for the screen is an aspiration I have carried around with me for years now. I'm inspired by people such as John Sayles or Steve Martin, who have managed to have both literary and film careers.
Men are sometimes awarded extra points for writing female characters well, and vice versa, fairly or not. Your book charts the inner lives of both sexes. Do you feel like you're drawing on different things when you write about men compared to women, or do they all feel universal to you?
I definitely fee l different when writing from a male point of view. I am much more conscious of what the character sees and what he notices. In my experience, I find that women and men tend to be drawn to different details. More profoundly, I feel that despair manifests in the two genders differently. At least in terms of my own characters, the men act out more and the women tend to internalize.
There are precedents for actors writing fiction, but do you worry about reactions to a movie star breaking into the literary game? Do you expect this book to be scrutinized more heavily than your memoir was?
Absolutely, but I am used to a fair amount of scrutiny having lived in the public eye for longer than I've lived out of it. What other people think about my writing is something that I think would have troubled me much more at an earlier age. Still, I don't consider myself entirely immune to criticism, particularly from people that I care about. Recently, I wrote an e-mail to an old friend, the writer Bret Easton Ellis, regarding my trepidation at giving the galley to my parents. He wrote back a very stern e-mail telling me (I'm paraphrasing) that if I hesitate writing prose based on other people's reaction, then I shouldn't write prose. I framed it and put it on my desk.
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