Wednesday: Molly Ringwald at Vroman’s

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Molly Ringwald, star of the iconic teen films “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink,” has grown up. She addresses this head-on in the first pages of her book “Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family and Finding the Perfect Lipstick.”

“On Feb. 18, 2008, I turned 40 years old,” she writes. “It hardly seemed possible.” The book celebrates growing up -- to 40 and, well, beyond.

Maybe it helps that it comes from a woman who is aware how much her youthful self has remained alive in the minds of fans. To some, she remains frozen as Duckie’s love interest, or as the girl who did that impossible lipstick trick -- yet she’s grown up and lived a complete life beyond those roles.

Ringwald, who has lived in France, once took an L.A. Times photographer along while she went book shopping in Venice. In the thanks to “Getting the Pretty Back,” the long-deceased John Cheever makes a surprise appearance. “Not only for reminding us of the ‘salvation of prose,’ ” she writes, “but for inadvertently and fortuitously leading me to my husband through the elegance of his prose.” Ringwald’s husband is a writer and editor; quotes from Cheever are included in Ringwald’s book, with his estate’s permission.

Ringwald, who is a star of the television show “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” will be at Vroman’s Books Wednesday in Pasadena at 7 p.m. She’ll be signing copies of “Getting the Pretty Back,” and the bookstore asks that fans leave any memorabilia they might want signed at home. But that doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t welcome a gift of some vintage Cheever.

-- Carolyn Kellogg
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