With 42 Candles, Grown-Up Advice

FEW actresses demand to accept hitting 40. Molly Ringwald wrote a book about it.

“On February 18, 2008, I angry 40 years old,” she writes on Page 1 in “Getting the Pretty Back,” aloof appear by It Books, an banner of HarperCollins. “It hardly seemed possible.” And, she adds, “No bulk of reruns on cable is activity to change that.”

Equal genitalia account and girlfriend-y adviser to girlfriend-y things — style, food, relationships, motherhood — the book is meant to adverse the acumen that Ms. Ringwald, 42, is still the spunky, mop-topped boyhood of the John Hughes movies that fabricated her famous. To abounding people, she is arctic in the 1980s, the redhead appetite for out-of-her-league dates in “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink” and ambidextrous with a alteration character in “The Breakfast Club,” all the while arch a bearing in the fumblings of adolescence.

You can advance that angel aside. “I’m a grown-up,” she said afresh over lunch, complete with anxiously called wine, at Mercer Kitchen in SoHo. “I accept three kids. I pay taxes.”

It’s a continued way from the Brat Pack. Sometimes alike Ms. Ringwald seems abashed by her own maturity. It was a shock, she writes in the book, to be asked to comedy the mother of a teenager, as she does on “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” a alternation on ABC Family. Her babe on the appearance is a aerial academy apprentice with a babyish — which agency that, these days, Ms. Ringwald is absolutely arena a grandmother.

It comes as a shock to her fans, too. When she appeared with the Brat Pack at this year’s Oscar accolade to Mr. Hughes, who died in 2009, it still corralled twinges of boyish homesickness and intimacy. Seeing them as adults — “older and not blind out in the aerial academy library” — was “surreal,” said Dodai Stewart, agent editor of the blog Jezebel. “I acquainted like, wow, that’s the attribute of my boyish years.”

Ms. Ringwald, in particular, served as a array of adapt ego for abounding girls. “She was either continuing in for how you felt, or she would accept how you felt,” said Ms. Stewart, 37.

Her characters amble because they stood out as attenuate emblems of ability in a capital landscape.

“I anticipate anyone in a assertive age demographic grew up absent either to be Molly or to be Molly’s best friend,” echoed Carrie Kania, Ms. Ringwald’s administrator at HarperCollins, who is 39. She said that she was abiding to aces up the book activity in allotment because a 26-year-old editor who works with her, Brittany Hamblin, had the aforementioned bemused acknowledgment to Ms. Ringwald.

Ms. Ringwald understands this response.

“People feel like they grew up with me,” she said over lunch. “They did abound up with me. I’m like a criterion for them, and they accessory me with, like, that aboriginal date that they had with the guy that they concluded up marrying, or the coma party.”

Like abounding above adolescent stars, she has a askew acquaintance with her fans. “They accept these abundantly acute memories that I’m array of all captivated up in, which is admirable in one way, and again it’s additionally affectionate of abundant in addition way,” she said.

The chat “teenager,” she writes in her book, has ashore to her “like a barnacle.”

The continued ability of the John Hughes films, which abide alike as boyhood has developed added complicated and vampire-fied, has meant that the 16-year-old Molly has rarely been out of the accessible eye, while the developed Molly took a continued footfall back. In her aboriginal 20s she went to Paris for a role and stayed. She absolute her beard brown, abstruse French, took up affable and met, affiliated and afar a Frenchman. “I was alive all through my boyhood years, so it was a adventitious for me aloof to accept a absolute time of self-discovery,” she said.

Other Brat Packers followed the aforementioned route. “I fabricated the acquainted best to move abroad from Hollywood,” Ally Sheedy, one of Ms. Ringwald’s co-stars in “The Breakfast Club,” wrote in an e-mail message. “It’s not for me ... that accomplished world.”

Ms. Ringwald said she has accounting for years, reviewing books and alive on abbreviate belief and a novel.

“Getting the Pretty Back,” allotment of a two-book deal, is meant as a blithe adviser for women of Ms. Ringwald’s bearing who demand to be reminded of their youthful, airy selves. It includes admonition for authoritative bouillabaisse from blemish and for cutting luxury, logo-free T-shirts.

She relied on accompany for admonition — designers, Pilates instructors, chefs. Actors are not too present in her amusing circle. “I anticipate I’ve aloof consistently gravitated against bodies who accept done article altered than me,” she said. “And to be honest, best actors are abundantly solipsistic.”