Actress Brooke Shields’ new memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, hitting shelves Tuesday, is a reflection on aging and agency as a woman — especially focused on those, like Shields, who grew up in the public eye.
Shields, 59, got her start in the entertainment business as a model when she was just months old. By the time she was 11 she was acting in films like Alice, Sweet Alice and, soon after, Pretty Baby, in which she posed nude. In her memoir, she writes that valuing herself at 59 years old is her “most provocative choice.”
In the book – and in an interview with NPR’s Leila Fadel airing Monday – Shields discusses the importance of self-advocacy for women, especially in medical spaces. Reflecting on her own experiences, she also opens up about having labia-reduction surgery – and finding out, upon waking up, that the male doctor had also performed something called “vaginal rejuvenation surgery” (the medical term this tightening process generally refers to is vaginoplasty) without her consent.
/ Flatiron Books
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Flatiron Books
“I was horrified, but also at a loss,” Shields writes in the memoir. “I didn’t want to sue this man – or maybe I did want to, but I didn’t feel I could – because I didn’t particularly want talk of my lady parts, once again, on the front page of every paper.”
On the advice of her gynecologist, Shields had elected to undergo a labiaplasty, a procedure which would reduce the size of her labia, to relieve chafing-type discomfort she’d been experiencing since high school.
But when she woke up, as Shields writes, she had been “given a younger vagina” — which was not something that she wanted or had consented to. She didn’t tell her husband about it for months, she writes.
“My shock and my disappointment was so acute, but it felt so familiar. It just felt like, oh, here we go again … I don’t know why you think it’s going to be any different, Brooke.” Shields told NPR.
In the interview, Shields also shared that to this day, she has not sued the doctor or gone after him in any way.
“I think I wasn’t strong enough. I didn’t feel secure enough in my career for it to yet again be about my anatomy. … I finally felt like I was past being defined by my virginity, you know?” she told NPR. “I think if it happened in this era, it would have been received much better.”
In Shields’ 1985 book, On Your Own, she shared that she was a virgin, which quickly became a topic of public discussion.
In a 2022 episode of her podcast, Now What? With Brooke Shields, she said she had regrets about sharing the status of her virginity so publicly. Though Shields said that the attention on her virginity led to “creepy” interviews, she also shared that it prepared her for her career as a woman in the media industry.
“To be in the line of fire at such a young age in that way, I gained a resilience, and it set me up to be ready for anything in this industry, which can be difficult,” she said on the podcast.
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