Brooke Shields has some things to say about aging

At 59 years old, Brooke is bringing it, with a sharp, funny memoir on getting older, a successful hair care line for midlife women, and refreshing thoughts on the pressure we feel to stay young forever.

- LAUREN IANNOTTI

Here AT REAL SIMPLE, we love advice from a multi-hyphenate woman about how she gets it all done. And while Brooke Shields (a CEO-actor-model-author-thinker-social media phenom-mom-friend-wife) could speak endlessly to that, she's here to talk about aging. Her new book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, just dropped, and with it her witty, insightful thoughts on entering “this next third” of her life. The gist: None of us are really allowed to get old. So what’s the woman who’s been the symbol of beauty for generations doing about it? Skipping the major procedures, for one. Being kind to herself, for another. And fashioning herself as a new kind of symbol—one of aging unapologetically.

LAUREN IANNOTTI: Can you explain the title of the book and why it’s so resonant? Because it’s so resonant.

BROOKE SHIELDS: It’s something I’ve felt for a long time. People imprint onto me, and they remember from a certain era of my life, and they’re attached to that. By virtue of that fact, I’m a disappointment as an older person. Not too long ago, a gentleman and I were speaking about years of wine vintages. I said my age—I was 58 at the time—and the minute I did, he stopped in his tracks and said, “You really shouldn’t have told me that.” And I thought, Wow. He wasn’t being mean. It was just his honest reaction. And while I’m not comparing myself to the likes of Marilyn Monroe, she died as Marilyn Monroe. If we saw her at 70-year-old woman, we’d probably be like, Oh, she’s no longer Marilyn Monroe. There’s something that happens to the human psyche when it comes to a face we’ve gotten attached to for some reason.

LI: That seems like the extreme version of what we all go through.