“I never imagined it was something I would do and never even considered it until I was asked,” she told Vanity Fair recently. Still, Ringwald admitted it wasn’t an obvious choice even for her. Translation is a career twist that may come as a surprise to some casual onlookers, but for an actor who put out a jazz record right after writing her first book of short stories, it’s not so unusual. Told from the present, the narrator-who is winkingly similar to Besson himself-runs into a young man with a strong resemblance to Thomas, and is shot back to the formative period of his life. It’s a story of a nebbish writer from the South of France as he recalls his first love with a classmate, Thomas, in 1984, their last year of high school. Ringwald’s first translation is Lie with Me, a 2017 bestseller by Philippe Besson, out in English for the first time this week. For her next trick, she’s made a French teenage love story available to English-speaking audiences. She played them in John Hughes’s catalogue of films, helping to put teens on the cultural map in the 80s she’s written them into her own book of short stories she mothers them through dramas big and small on Freeform’s delightful The Secret Life of the American Teenager and she’s in the midst of raising one, with two to follow soon enough. Molly Ringwald’s talents are often deployed in the service of teenagers.
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