From an early age, the model and actor Brooke Shields has been accustomed to seeing herself through the eyes of others. At 11, she played a teenage prostitute in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, at 14 a castaway discovering sex in The Blue Lagoon, and had her face licensed to doll manufacturers in the 1980s. When she was 15, Barbara Walters asked her about her measurements on national TV.

Shields had hoped that, by her late 50s, those days of physical scrutiny would be behind her. Yet now she finds herself fending off judgment about her age. Recently, she was at a party where the male host was crestfallen when she told him the year she was born – 1965 – and said he wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “The fact that I, presumably someone he remembers best as a pin-up from his childhood, could be close to 60 ruined something fundamental for him,” Shields notes. “The implication was that I should keep my ‘vintage’ a secret or be ashamed that I have the audacity to be almost 60, because that meant I could no longer be the dream girl or have sex appeal.”

In her book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, written with journalist Rachel Bertsche, the actor confronts the realities of middle age, not just as a celebrity famed for her looks but also as a woman dealing with the pressures and symptoms of her time of life: declining oestrogen, waning libido, children leaving home, and a wider society that would prefer she remain quiet and meek.

This isn’t Shields’s first book: 2005’s Down Came the Rain documented her harrowing experience of postpartum depression, while 2014’s There Was a Little Girl examined her complicated relationship with her mother. Where those two titles were built around experiences that were, if not unique, then certainly rare, this book – which combines memoir with polemic and self-help – draws on more common mid-life difficulties and the coping mechanisms she has adopted to deal with them.

When she recalls the unsolicited attempts by medical professionals to persuade her to look younger – such as the dermatologist who, while checking a mole, waved a hand airily around her face and said, “We could fix all that” – it’s hard not to think of Demi Moore’s dilemma in “hagsploitation” movie The Substance. And then there’s the doctor who, following a necessary labiaplasty procedure, told her: “I tightened you up a little bit! Gave you a little rejuvenation!” This was said, she continues, “as if he’d done me a favour and that I should, in fact, be grateful. There was a real ‘I threw this in for free, little lady’ vibe to his delivery.” She is good, as well, on the double standards applied to older women – grow old gracefully but stay beautiful! Stand up for yourself but don’t be pushy! – and advocates celebrating one’s accomplishments, saying no to things you don’t want to do, shoring up your physical health for the future and so on.

Elsewhere, though, there is a lot of repetitive speechifying about empowerment and self-acceptance, and use of that now deadly phrase “of a certain age” to denote women in their 40s and upwards (this was written before Gregg Wallace deployed it in defence of his behaviour on MasterChef). Shields can sometimes strike a disingenuous note, too, such as in her recollection of waiting to take the stage for a Q&A session following a screening of Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, the 2021 documentary about her life. When she saw the audience get to their feet at the end of the film, she says she assumed they were leaving and it fell to her friend and the film’s executive producer Ali Wentworth to tell her: “They aren’t leaving, silly, they’re applauding.” Does Shields, a woman with eyes, ears and obvious intelligence, really not know what people look like when they clap?

Nonetheless, given all that she endured in her early life and career – an alcoholic mother, being the family breadwinner from infancy and a sex symbol before she had reached puberty – it’s to her credit that she has emerged grounded and with a clear sense of self. Wealthy celebrities dispensing advice on how we can all live better can stick in the craw, but Shields is no Gwyneth Paltrow, and has the foresight to acknowledge her privilege as an actor of considerable means. For those readers in the throes of middle age, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old won’t change their life, but it might make them feel a little more understood.