Five questions for Molly Ringwald

Molly Ringwald, 44, original member of the Brat Pack, is best known for the iconic coming-of-age movies Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Now she's an author and back with her second book, When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories (itbooks, $24.99, 256pp). She spoke with USA TODAY from Greece, where she was on vacation with her husband and three children, and answered five questions.

By Fergus Greer

"Right now I'm focused on the book," says Molly Ringwald. But she also is adapting the screenplay, and she has an album due in spring 2013.

By Fergus Greer

"Right now I'm focused on the book," says Molly Ringwald. But she also is adapting the screenplay, and she has an album due in spring 2013.

1. Did you marry a Greek-American so you can vacation there?
"That's right. All part of the grand plan!"

2. It says here that you write with "a deep compassion for human imperfection." Do you relate?
(Laughs) "I think it's impossible to be human and not relate to that. Absolutely. We're all pretty flawed, but that's what makes us interesting."

3. In these tales, you follow a Los Angeles family through everyday life. Could that family sometimes be yours?
"No, they're very different from mine, although I do have a daughter and a husband. But no, fortunately it's not my family!"

4. Writing is so solitary, the opposite of being on stage. What's harder, acting or writing?
Writing. I started acting as a child. It was very instinctive. In many ways children are the best actors. It just flows and it's natural. Writing is, like you say, very solitary. It's hard.

5. Do you write these stories thinking they could be turned into a movie or play?
"I didn't when I was writing it. To write a novel just to be turned into a screenplay, you're cheating the art form. However, now I am thinking about it, but I also know that it's going to have to change quite a bit."

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Unlikely hero goes on an "Unlikely Pilgrimage"

When a man learns an old friend is dying, he decides to walk 600 miles through the English countryside to see her.

The unlikely but lovable hero of Rachel Joyce's remarkable debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, doesn't call his walk a pilgrimage. He never even calls it a hike, which would suggest planning, a map and hiking boots, all of which Harold lacks.

It takes him 87 days to walk from one end of England to the other, 627 miles, including mistakes and diversions. And all this by a 65-year-old retired sales rep, whose wife reminds him the farthest he had ever walked was to his car.

But when a woman he had once known but not seen in 20 years writes to say she's dying of cancer, Harold takes his inadequate response to the nearest mail box. Rather than mailing it, he keeps walking, dressed in a tie and yacht shoes, although no yachts are involved.

He phones his mystified and furious wife, saying it isn't enough to just post a letter. He will walk to see his old friend, Queenie Hennessy. He phones her hospice to say, "Tell her Harold Fry is on his way…I will keep walking and she must keep living."

Pilgrimage, one of the 12 novels just long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award, is a gentle adventure with an emotional wallop. It's a smart, feel-good story that doesn't feel forced.

Harold "had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary. He lacked color. Other people knew interesting stories, or had things to ask. He didn't like to ask, because he didn't like to offend."

He knows he is not good with emotion. He also knows he has made a mess out of being a husband, a father and a friend. (Exactly what happened two decades earlier isn't revealed until nearly the end.)

As Harold walks, he remembers "things I didn't know I'd forgotten." He replays scenes from his life. He stops seeing distance in terms of miles. "He measured it with his remembering." His only map is the one in his head, "made up of all the people and places he had passed."

He elicits confessions and advice. A waitress tells him, "If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope."

Harold, who's "afraid religion is not something I ever quite got the hang of," finds believers among the strangers he meets:

"They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious."

His walk is not easy, especially after he mails his credit cards back to his wife. Complications ensue after an encounter with a reporter who serves up equal helpings of publicity and misunderstandings.

At home, Harold's wife, Maureen, comes to realize, "It was not a life, if lived without love." On the road, Harold sees, "You could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way."

In an author's note to readers, Joyce, a former Shakespearean actress in England, writes that her novel began as a radio play she wrote for her dad as he was dying of cancer, knowing he would never live to hear it. But she wanted to write "something life-affirming at the point when I was losing the person I most wanted to keep."

She's done that and more. I can't think of a better recommendation for summer reading. And take your time, just as Harold does.

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Book buzz: Humorist David Rakoff has died

By Lindsay Deutsch, USA TODAY

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:

--RIP David Rakoff: David Rakoff, essayist, humorist and radio personality known for his work on This American Life, has died at 47. He was being treated for cancer. He wrote three books, Don't Get Too Comfortable, Fraud and Half Empty, which won the 2011 Thurber Prize, and had delivered a novel entitled Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish, which Doubleday plans to publish posthumously in 2013.

--Rich authors: Check out Forbes' list of the world's top-earning authors, from James Patterson to Jeff Kinney. Notably, female authors are rising on the list, led by phenoms Janet Evanovich, E.L. James, J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins.

--Agatha Christie memorial: Crime fiction lovers will soon have a place to pay homage to their queen. London will erect a statue commemorating "queen of crime fiction" Agatha Christie, The Guardian reports. USA TODAY's Craig Wilson suggests a Christie-related reading list, and look through photos of the author and her presence in culture today.

--Musical reads: Get your groove on this #FridayReads with Brainpickings' literary jukebox, connecting songs to lines from favorite books.

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Bret Easton Ellis shows 50 shades of green?

We have a new Twitter-fueled uproar today. Why is bad-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis claiming TV actor Matt Bomer is "too gay" to play a straight role in a movie of Fifty Shades of Grey?

There is no movie, or at least not yet. It's not yet even a glimmer in Hollywood's addled brain, let alone cast, but fans of the hot-hot-hot novels of sadomasochistic sex are busy casting the major characters anyway, especially on Twitter. Bomer, the hot-hot-hot star of USA Network's White Collar who also had a role in this year's Magic Mike, is being mentioned to play the novels' soft-porn protagonist Christian Grey.

No way, tweeted Ellis, 48, the author and screenwriter of American Psycho and other books, who may or may not be gay himself but surely is the brattiest of the literary Brat Pack. He has nothing against gays or Bomer, Ellis says, but Christian Grey has to be into women or the story won't work. Which is what he said in a Twitter rant this week.

"He's NOT right for Christian G," he tweeted Wednesday. "Okay I'll say it. Matt Bomer isn't right for Christian Grey because he is openly gay...He's not CG. Never...I am NOT discriminating Matt Bomer because of his sexuality. Fifty Shades of Grey demands an actor that is genuinely into women. Get it?!?"

Cue the ensuing flow of push-back and atta boy tweets.

And, mind you, the fact that Ellis didn't get the job to adapt the story for the big screen has nothing to do with what E!Online called "Fifty Shades of Bitter." On that point, Ellis tweeted earlier, "It's a very major disappointment to announce that I've somehow been taken off the list of possible screenwriters for Fifty Shades of Grey..."

Bomer, 32, who recently came out, plays a sexy straight guy in his TV show and so far has managed to be persuasive despite going home every night to his male partner and their children. Ellis, in another tweet, said he thinks Bomer comes off as "totally gay" in White Collar.

By the way, Ellis himself has long been coy in multiple interviews over the years about defining his own sexuality. For artistic reasons, he has said, he doesn't want to say because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read (his books) in a different way. If they knew I was gay, Psycho would be read as a different book."

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Vaddey Ratner emerges from the 'Shadow' of her childhood

POTOMAC, Md. – Debut novelist Vaddey Ratner is a study in contrasts.

Left by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Although 'In the Shadow of the Banyan' is inspired by her childhood, Vaddey Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir.

Left by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Although 'In the Shadow of the Banyan' is inspired by her childhood, Vaddey Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir.

Tiny and exquisite like the Cambodian princess she is, Ratner also possesses the friendliness of a Midwesterner who spent her high school years in St. Paul. A summa cum laudeIvy League graduate married to her college sweetheart, she lives with her husband and daughter, 12, in this leafy suburb of Washington, D.C., complete with her daughter's fairy-tale treehouse out back.

Ratner's own childhood, however, was very different — a nightmare spent in the killing fields of Cambodia.

What a life.

And now, what a book.

"This is the one story I had to write," says Ratner, 41. In stores this week, Ratner's first novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster, $25), has emerged as one of this year's most anticipated books, thanks to early rave reviews.

Although In the Shadow of the Banyan is inspired by her childhood, Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir. Her goal wasn't to provide journalistic evidence of Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, where it is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed 1 million to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979.

Rather, it was personal. "This book allows me to save my family, to immortalize them, to bring them back to life, for me to eternalize them," Ratner says.

Most of all, it brings back her adored father. At age 5, Ratner saw him led away by soldiers. When, where and how he was killed, no one knows.

Narrated by 7-year-old Raami, Banyan opens in magical luxury. Servants bustle about the Phnom Penh estate — the old gardener putting lotus flowers in iced water to stay fresh; Raami's nanny, her "milk mother," nagging her to get ready to dine with her grandmother, a high princess. (Like the author, Raami is connected to Cambodia's complicated royal bloodlines but not in line to inherit the throne.)

Meanwhile, explosions can be heard outside as the Khmer Rouge circle the doomed city.

Ratner opened her novel with a scene of peace "so you can see the beauty that is struggling to exist amid this war." Soon Raami and her family — mother, father, grandmother, aunts, uncles and baby sister — are forced at gunpoint to leave for the countryside. Because her father is a prince, he is targeted by the Communists trying to create a classless, self-sufficient, agrarian society. Raami witnesses the result: death, terror and starvation.

Writing "an imaginative narrative" allowed Ratner to change details such as the narrator's age. Asked how a 5-year-old could remember so much, Ratner explains that her memories of her father were particularly strong because of the polio she suffered as an infant.

Today, Ratner walks with a limp, but as a baby, the handicap was "devastating" in a culture that prized "physical perfection."

Instead of shunning her and her metal leg brace, her father — a royal who had married a commoner — spent an enormous amount of time with Ratner. "He was always talking to me," she says.

Ratner's ability to speak vanished for a period. She was mute when she and her mother escaped from Cambodia. (Ratner's baby sister died of malaria.) After two years in refugee camps, they came to the USA in 1981.

Speaking no English when she arrived at age 11, Ratner went on to become her high school's valedictorian. She met and married her American husband — today an environmental expert — at Carleton College and later graduated from Cornell.

Cambodia today is very different from the country Ratner fled. There is a king again — one of Ratner's relatives. Ratner lived in Cambodia from 2005 to 2009 when her husband was working for an environmental think tank.

Although she didn't complete the manuscript and find an agent until she was an adult, Ratner says that "even as a little girl, I always knew I had to tell about living through this ordeal.

"I need the world to remember."

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'Kings of Cool' is a pulpy California tale

It's a mean, sun-dappled and pithy world that Don Winslow's outlaw characters inhabit in Kings of Cool.

Loyalties are constantly shifting. Drugs are ubiquitous, words are minimal and life is cheap. There is only one constant in Winslow's universe: the affection between the young trio at the novel's center.

Here we get the weed-whacked origin stories of close friends Ben, Chon and O, who were introduced in Winslow's 2010 best seller Savages (recently made into a movie directed by Oliver Stone and starring Blake Lively and Taylor Kitsch).

Navy SEAL Chon has a frighteningly easy way with violence. Ben studied botany in college and has a do-gooder's inclinations, but a casual callousness. Ben and Chon run a lucrative marijuana business with some ancillary help from O (for Ophelia), the twentysomething blonde they place above their own safety. And their safety is continually compromised by drug cartels, competing dope dealers, crooked law officers and even close family.

But O, Chon and Ben's bond is inviolable. Their development arrested, thanks to rotten parenting, the three cling to each other.

Set in 2005, this prequel goes back to when Ben and Chon launched their hydroponic grass enterprise. Shortly thereafter, they are asked (read ordered summarily) by a murky group called The Association to make monthly payments to a network dealing imported drugs. Afghanistan War vet Chon fights back and the trio's battles begin, ranging from Orange County to Mexico, via flashbacks to the pot peddlers of the mid-'60s and on to coked-out casualties of the following decades. We get the goods on the parents of Ben, Chon and O, subplots that are particularly chilling and often more compelling than the main story linking their children.

Winslow's brash shorthand style can be grating, but it suits the drug-hazed tale, set in California's moneyed Laguna Beach. He takes a simple declarative sentence and breaks it down to a kind of surf rap.

"Together Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist."

Winslow coins terms (some clever, some forced) and weaves in song lyrics. Action is presented in snippets and chapter-ettes (the first chapter is merely two words). Winslow's weakness is trying so hard to be royally cool. His self-consciously terse dialogue can seem more like the text of a tween than an adult novelist.

"O was made for sunshine. California gurl."

But as a former private investigator, Winslow knows his crime scene. His influences range from Tom Wolfe, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy to the "surf noir" of Kem Nunn.

Occasionally he interjects a script format to further illuminate his amped-up prose. Not surprisingly, Kings of Cool reads more like a screenplay than a novel.

While Winslow's fractured narrative initially comes off a bit jarring, it ties up intriguingly. By the pulpy tale's dramatic conclusion involving a tense shootout with a surprise drug lord, it's tough not to be hooked.

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Gabby Douglas, from gold medal to bestseller?

By Jocelyn McClurg, USA TODAY

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:

Ringwald's new novel: USA TODAY's Craig Wilson catches up with the Brat Pack's Molly Ringwald about her new book, When It Happens to You.

A survivor's tale: Vaddey Ratner used her terrifying experiences as a child in Cambodia in tell her own story through fiction. The debut novelist talks with USA TODAY's Deirdre Donahue.

Book buzz: Readers are discovering The Light Between Oceans, a debut novel by an Australian writer that has strong bookseller support. It debuts at No. 22 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. And while the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy continues to dominate the list, traditional romances are also a hit in the August heat. Infinity Ring: Book 1: A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner, the first in a seven-book series for kids, will be released Aug 28. Check out the cover and read an excerpt.

Solid Gold: Today.com reports that 16-year-old Olympic gymnastics darling Gabby Douglas is being pursued by numerous publishers who want her to tell her story.

'Lightning' strikes:Glee's Chris Colfer, whose debut YA novel The Land of Stories is a USA TODAY best seller, will follow up in November with another book for young readers, GalleyCat reports.

Cameron Diaz, personal trainer: HarperCollins announced today that it has acquired a book on health and wellness by Cameron Diaz. In the untitled book due in fall 2013, the actress will provide tips for young women on "fitness, nutrition and well-being," says her publisher.

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