Andrew McCarthy
“It has to be the connection that happens with the people,” says author and actor, Andrew McCarthy, explaining what he enjoys most about meeting his readers when he does literary events. “When I’m telling a story and I see the heads begin to nod, that identification is a really satisfying thing. You sit in a room alone for a year, spilling your guts onto the page, then the book goes out into the world. It’s nice to know it’s been received.”
McCarthy’s memoir and travel adventure, The Longest Way Home, began with a crisis that most people would prefer to keep secret. After success as an actor sent him spiraling into alcoholism and drug use, a trek along Spain’s Camino de Santiago helped him rediscover himself and spurred a passion for travel. Years later, on the eve of marriage, he finds himself struggling over his inability to commit. So he sets off on another round of trips — not to escape himself, but to figure out how to find the elusive sense of peace with himself that’ll help him become the husband and father he wishes he were.
A rare book that speaks to men as well as women, young and old alike, The Longest Way Home explores the exotic regions of the outer world and the inner regions of the self. Students can identity with its themes of love, insecurity, and commitment, while older readers can connect with the understandings and life lessons that Andrew learns from fatherhood and the passing of time.
Once known for his acting roles in films such as Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire, Andrew began getting his travel pieces published in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The Atlantic. Now an editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler, he still takes the time to act (both in television and the theater), direct, and travel across the country sharing his adventures with others.
Says Andrew: “It’s really gratifying when people come up and say how the book has been important in their lives, how it’s illuminated something they have experienced but hadn’t been able to put their finger on. Or that now they understand their partner a little better. I had a woman come up to me and grab my arm, hard. ‘Your book saved my marriage,’ she said. We laughed — then we didn’t. It’s a gratifying feeling.”
The Longest Way Home has been dubbed by many as the Eat, Pray, Love for men, and one of the most common refrains in the many sterling reviews it’s received is something along the lines of, “Who knew he could write so well too.” If there were such a thing as the perfect book for college students, The Longest Way Home is it. The behind-the-scenes look at the life of movie stars, coupled with the excitement of adventure travel to exotic locales will keep readers turning the page. But it’s the perfectly doled out moments of philosophy and introspection that spur every reader to contemplate their own future, ponder the path they should take, and consider the kind of person that want to become.
“I think, I hope anyway,” says Andrew, “that the broad appeal of this book is laying bare some of the challenges of intimacy and partnership — recognizing our ultimate aloneness, and yet the need for connection, and really that connection is the only game in town worth playing. That, and the love of a good travel yarn.”
