Teen Dreams and Time Travel

Frankly, I’m shocked. It’s already 7:35, novelist John Reimringer has been interviewing Molly Ringwald for fifteen minutes, and, so far, she’s remained Molly Ringwald, author of When it Happens to You, a novel in stories newly published by It Books/Harper Collins. Then it comes out: How have you handled the transition from acting, he wants to know—“a very collaborative art—to writing—a very solitary art?” And this is all we get—a suspicious skirting of John Hughes, teenage stardom, and pre-Edward Scissor-hands Anthony Michael Hall. Suspicious and, I’m sure, a relief to over half the audience, including Ringwald herself.

You can hear that relief die in the corner—a little hissing sound, I imagine, like a popped pastry—when the floor opens up for questions. Question no. 3, from the man with the shy wife: “Do you think you’re going to have a difficult time, as a serious novelist, overcoming the image of sweet little Molly Ringwald?”

“First of all,” she says, “I don’t feel like I’ve ever been little. I’ve been 5’8” and a half since I was fifteen.”

This at 7:50, maybe—only ten minutes before the questions are over and the book signing begins. You’d have to be a unique species of naïf to think questions like these are rare, or that they take Ringwald by surprise. Actually, you’d have to be the stupidest person on earth. In reviewing When it Happens to You for the New York Times, Dan Kois drops four film titles plus a television series in his first paragraph, the void between them filled by adjectives like “plucky” and “popular,” nouns like “idol.” Do you think, man with the shy wife, that Proust might’ve had a thing for dudes?

I admit, when I received the announcement from Common Good Books that Ringwald would read in September, I didn’t simply add it to my calendar like I would any other reading. I forwarded the press release to 20 or so friends (Subject: “Das Ringwald”) using whatever the linguistic equivalent of arm-flailing might be to convince them to attend. I also admit that, upon reading Kois’s review several weeks later, his lukewarm assessment of the novel as “sort of bad. But! … not so bad that you don’t think she might get there someday,” I wasn’t all that shocked, nor was my world turned upside-down. Molly Ringwald, in that world, was an actress. That she’d written a novel just seemed superfluous, or mean (emerging writers think everyone is mean, at least if what they do appears to come naturally). I didn’t expect anything, and (“But!”) neither did Kois, apparently.

That said, I didn’t arrive early and I didn’t snag a seat in the front row of Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel just to swoon over the ‘80s teen starlet who made her cinematic breakthrough five months before I was born. Reimringer, in his question to Ringwald, is dead on: writing is a solitary endeavor, and not for the faint of heart. Like most young writers, I relish any opportunity to glimpse into another writer’s experience—so much so it almost seems sadistic. I want to hear about that solitude.

As a young stage performer, actress, singer, and dancer, Ringwald grew up around polyphonic praise and criticism, direction and advice. In her teenage years she began to fall in love with stories—Salinger’s, Cheever’s, and Fitzgerald’s, which for a long time kept her from Hemingway’s, “because he was too mean,” she thought. It was Raymond Carver, however, that would become her primary motivation for writing. She found her first copy of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love at nineteen, on a friend’s coffee table, and read it straight through. “I was dumbfounded,” she tells the audience, still clearly in love with such writing that, until then, in her friend’s apartment, she’d had no idea existed. “When I write characters,” she says, “I want to know their flaws.” It’s the flaws, she says, that she always kept in mind when she was acting. Certainly Carver is a master model for this, as well as for characters that say one thing and do another—an aspect of fiction that fascinates her, she admits, holding the room’s attention like any novelist. It’s easy to forget, if you want to know the truth, that that’s Molly Ringwald, 20 feet away, donning a black dress and black, cat-eyed glasses. That twenty-seven years ago she sat somewhere in a high school library-looking movie set and translated John Hughes’ script into her own adolescent version of existential pain—you’d be surprised how quickly all that vanishes, how readily you accept her as Molly Ringwald, debut novelist. Even with the occasional gape-mouthed thirty-something sitting near the back, 25 years late to his wettest of dreams, Ringwald holds her own as an author.

It would sound cloying if I said that I first saw Sixteen Candles when I was sixteen years old, so for the sake of realism let’s just say I was fifteen. It was shortly after my mother and I moved to Saint Paul, my father to a lakeside suburb that used to be a small town. This was when I was still going to be a musician, when I thought I was on the right track fooling around in my room with a girlfriend every chance I got. I might’ve seen The Breakfast Club a year or two before. It would also sound cloying if I said these films left me changed in some way, or that I learned something from them about life. Which is good, because they didn’t change me any more than every other film I’ve ever seen has changed me. The only sentimental thing about them, now, is how catching snippets of them in video stores¹ or on television puts me in the frame of mind to think, Ha, this movie—I remember when I first saw it, even though what I really mean is, I remember who I was when I first saw it.

My mother saves everything. Everything, in this case, meaning six banker’s boxes worth of grade school art projects, notebooks, and loose-leaf math homework. When she lost her house in Saint Paul she drove my entire grade school history to my apartment and handed it over—“Otherwise I’m throwing it out,” she said, and cue the standard who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-my-mother joke. I told her I’d just throw it out anyway, but I didn’t, and I still haven’t, apparently just as sentimental as she. I went through a box once and found everything inside to be too strange—my handwriting, for example, or a primitive ancestor thereof, margin to pink-lined margin in my elementary school notebooks, etching out my frustration with summer’s heat (still hate it) and how I’d love to see wasps eradicated from the earth (still do). It really is like reading letters from a wholly different part of yourself. And we’re not talking last night’s drunk texts, here—more like a unidirectional time travel available only to those with the patience to go on living. I’m discovering, now, that this happens whenever I read anything I’ve written. The older the text, obviously, the greater the distance, and the more irreconcilable the two Patricks involved. That’s not to say I’m ashamed of what you might call the lives you might say I’ve lived—I mean, the writing is always brutally bad, but it’s not like I’m going to cut myself off from those other individuals and pretend it wasn’t me that complained when the girls I played with growing up wouldn’t let me wear the prettiest dress in the box, that I never said, at six years old, “There’s pajillions!” in a commercial for a massive retailer I now refuse to support, or that some other boy swore, up and down, for three years of his life, a love that wasn’t really love at all, only fear. Sometimes time traveling is simply logging in to an old e-mail address and getting lost in its hell.

“It’s not often that I get starstruck,” David Enyeart, assistant manager and events coordinator at Common Good Books, explains after an adorably bungled introduction. Conversely, I’ve suffered from sycophancy most of my life, from the playground to the publishing happy hour. Not that it’s done me any good. So what I expected were the proverbial butterflies, the omg omg it’s her! people get when they spot some fictional construct they’ve never met and, honestly, never will. An hour or so before the reading started, I was across the street browsing the shelves at Common Good, and heard someone squeal, “Hi, Molly!” like they’d just run into Jesus Christ or Joseph Stalin, but when I looked over it was some other Molly, her hair the wrong color of red. In the end, though, none of that happened—the butterflies, the omg. Whoever sighed and rolled her eyes, whosever lips’ shade of red was only outmatched by that of her hairsprayed hair, she wasn’t there that night. Novelist Molly Ringwald took questions on character, on what it takes to succeed as a writer (“time,” “endurance,” “courage”), on her choice to write a novel in stories rather than a traditional narrative arc, on the writers that changed who she is and who she wanted to be. I’m sure she’s in touch with the Molly Ringwald of the ‘80s, and I’m sure she learns a lot from her, but that doesn’t mean she’s accountable for everything that teen idol did or said or wore. Take on that responsibility, and you might as well hold yourself accountable for what you do in others’ dreams.

Visit Ringwald’s official website at: http://www.iammollyringwald.com
And don’t let Kois’s review dissuade you from buying her novel: When it Happens to You