Early on in Andrew McCarthy’s latest travelogue, “Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America,” a scene unfolds in which the actor-turned-bestselling author pays an announced visit to Seve (nickname for “Stephen”), a lifelong friend suffering from chronic back pain that’s rendered him unable to get out much. Seve has let the detritus of life pile up around him — literally — with delivery packages and plastic-wrapped clothes overrunning his tiny Baltimore apartment. McCarthy, who’s road-tripped from his home in New York City, proceeds cautiously, stepping gently around the mess and breaking down boxes. It’s a fragile moment, if an uncompromising one, revealing the ways in which many of us have the tendency to sometimes hide the rawest, most shameful facets of our deepest selves from those who know and love them best.
“What had actually happened to my friendships?” McCarthy wonders. “Were they still there, as I claimed? Did I even want them? Or need them? What did I get from them, anyway? What did I have to offer them? How did friendship affect my place in the world?”
It’s a query that McCarthy, who came of age — and amassed megawatt fame — as a 1980s heartthrob in films like “Class” and “Pretty in Pink” before transitioning to feted author, longs to address. And so, he does. In “Who Needs Friends,” his third soul-baring travel memoir, McCarthy embarks on a 10,000-mile, six-weeks-long Odyssean quest, crisscrossing the continental United States to repair and restore Platonic male relationships left to wither, not by intention or design, but by virtue of the unavoidable ways in which work, family and geography — and, yes, the internet — rupture the meaningful connections we deem most precious and transformative in our lives. McCarthy readily confesses he’s “very much a loner,” quiet and pensive — and yet he craves attachment. He considers Seve “a surrogate big brother.” And they hadn’t seen each other in years. How had he let that happen?
Sensing he’s as much to blame for the lack of contact as the guys on the other end, McCarthy sets out to revive these atrophied friendships, to make them whole again, to make them new — and to feel less alone. “Men have no monopoly on loneliness, but it is a massive issue,” says McCarthy over an early morning Zoom from his Manhattan apartment. “And it’s something a lot of people, particularly men, don’t want to admit, because to them it means weakness.”
As he drives in “Who Needs Friends,” mostly solo, from the East Coast to the West, McCarthy — who “hates driving” and completed the 22-state trek in short bursts — mines themes ranging from isolation to parenthood in the modern age, excavating secrets not only about the men who helped shape his adult life, but the defining culture of male camaraderie across America. In the casual, observational fashion of Alexis de Tocqueville, or perhaps more like Steinbeck, McCarthy talks to men, young and old, at road stops and tourist traps from Atlantic City to a Lake Tahoe casino, interviewing them about what Aristotle calls “the nature of the friendship.”
What McCarthy discovers is that in a society obsessed with male bravado, one that far too often values virility above vulnerability, it’s the knocking down of emotional walls that enables male friendships to thrive. Whether it’s Eddie, a friend McCarthy met in high school who resides in Alto, Texas, or Larry, a buddy in Austin, honesty and confession form the bedrock of true male intimacy. Trust is key. But friendship extends beyond trust, McCarthy learns — it’s about laying bare the deepest, darkest details of who we actually are.
“I was coming home to myself in a very real way,” says McCarthy of the journey. “The irony of this book on friendship is that I spent the vast majority of it alone. But I never felt alone, because I really did connect to the country in a way I hadn’t for a long time. I fell in love with America again, and what America really is — not all this crazy political stuff. Everyone was so open to me.”
“I’ve written these three sort-of travel memoirs, which I think of as a loose trilogy,” McCarthy continues. “The first is “The Longest Way Home,” where I was trying to come to terms with getting married again, where I was asking, how do you maintain intimacy and preserve your inherent solitude? And then I wrote [“Walking With Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain”] about my son and I walking across Spain. And it’s really a father-son book. And this new one is a book about America. But it’s really about friends.”
McCarthy has a delicate, soft-spoken way about him, shy and introspective, if a little melancholy, with a boyish smile that became the signifying feature of his big-screen persona and the reason Gen X girls flocked to the movie theater during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Now 63, McCarthy’s grin and tender charm remain intact, and it’s easy to see why complete strangers in remote, off-the-grid pockets of Mississippi and West Texas and Kentucky, men with no idea that McCarthy was once a dreamy bedroom pinup, warmed up to him as he plied them with questions about the role friendship plays in their lives.
“There wasn’t a single man I met who didn’t respond when I said, can I talk to you about your friends?” says McCarthy. “Maybe they looked at me like I was f— crazy at the beginning — but not a single guy said ‘no’ to me.”
In retrospect, taken collectively, much of McCarthy’s work as an actor, filmmaker and journalist hinges on the friendship motif — that primordial ache to belong, that yearning to be seen. “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Less Than Zero,” “Pretty in Pink” — all are stories about young adult cliques and clans, movies chronicling adolescent identity and the pervasive loneliness that exists when we inevitably drift apart from one another, when we push one another away. Likewise, pangs of nostalgia form the basis for McCarthy’s 2021 memoir “Brat: An ‘80s Story” and its attendant documentary “Brats,” a project in which McCarthy tracks down fellow Hollywood “Brat Packers” such as Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy and Demi Moore, reuniting with them for the first time in over 30 years. Together, they wrestle with the legacy of teenage stardom and its global meteoric impact.
“Brats” is very much so “about the public facade of friendship,” notes McCarthy.
“The thing that surprised me most [about making “Brats”] is how much affection we had for each other that we didn’t have when we were young,” says McCarthy. “I lived in New York, they all lived in L.A. It was the ’80s — it wasn’t as easy as it is now to be sort of seamless across the country. You know, we were these 22-year-old kids. You’re scared, competitive and getting all this attention. It was a very confusing, head-spinning time.”
Decades later he says the “brats” share an intimacy. ”I could look at, say, Rob and it’s like, I know nothing about your life, but I know what you and I went through, and we’re the only ones who went through this,” says McCarthy. “And it altered our lives in a very real way.”
But McCarthy’s closest confidants are men who’ve never set foot on a film set, men never trailed by paparazzi, and it’s those relationships to which he tends in “Who Needs Friends.” It’s a book that, in juxtaposition to “Brats,” charts “the private, personal sort of friendship.” Men — McCarthy’s friends — are lonely. Divorce, marriage, kids, no kids; so many of the men in McCarthy’s orbit feel alienated, adrift, untethered to any community. Marooned on their own de facto uninhabited island.
In “Who Needs Friends,” McCarthy offers no full-safe salve for the loneliness of men — after all, who can? But it’s “the physical action of showing up,” the effort McCarthy makes to rekindle languishing friendships that goes a long way in proving just how much these friendships mean. Turns out, the simple act of talking about one’s friendship, the very “acknowledgment” that it exists, works to strengthen those bonds.
Saval is an award-winning journalist and the author of “The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens.”
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