We could refer to Andrew McCarthy as an actor, but that wouldn’t be completely accurate to his life today.
Though he made a lasting impression in film roles from the ‘80s, like Molly Ringwald's love interest in "Pretty In Pink," these days McCarthy is a travel writer, a TV director, and now a novelist.
His first foray into fiction writing is called "Just Fly Away." It’s a young adult novel about a girl who finds out that her dad has fathered a child out of wedlock, and she decides to run away from home.
Though this is McCarthy’s first novel, he’s written travel articles for National Geographic Traveler and the New York Times. He also wrote a travel memoir called: “The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down.”
Interview highlights:
On going from an actor to a writer:
Like everything in my life, it was sort of an accident. Paul Theroux's books changed my life. His travel books inspired me to travel in a certain way. I would travel for months at a time, alone. Someone suggested I keep a journal — and I tried. I was not a good journaler. Then one day I just started writing down stories of what was happening. I was an actor and I've said so much bad dialogue that I know good dialogue when I hear it.
I started crafting and I did it just for myself for 10 years, just to keep me company on the road. I had no intention with it until one day I badgered an editor until he let me write for him, and then that was that. But it was also one of those things where you can do all these travel stories and never meet any editors. It's all online through email. So no one knew, Oh, it's the guy from "Pretty In Pink." He thinks he's a writer. There was none of that going on. It was simply a guy with a good pitch who turned in a good story. So by the time I was outed for being the same guy who's in these movies, it wasn't as easily dismissed as it might have been.
On his travel memoir, "The Longest Way Home":
That book was largely about how we have our inherent singularity and intimacy as well. The answer, of course, is, we can't and yet we have to do it anyway. That book was a quest of how do I reconcile these two aspects of myself? I'm getting married. This person, I love. We have children. And yet, I yearn to escape. What's that and how do we reconcile those things?
I figured it out the way I figured out most things — by leaving. I find that escape is a very viable option in the sense that I always run smack into what I'm looking for when I escape, even though I don't know that's what I was looking for when I left.
On how his young adult novel "Just Fly Away" came about:
I started writing a book about a guy who had a one night fling and had this child out of wedlock that he kept a secret from the family. The whole point was, I was interested in the idea of secrecy in marriage and how we incrementally grow apart over a long period of time. For seven years I was working on that. I put it down to work on that other travel book. It just kept coming back to me. I could never crack it. My favorite character in it was always the 15-year-old daughter who was a very minor character, until one day I just started writing from her point of view. And what had been a struggle suddenly just flowed and everything changed. Suddenly I was writing a young adult novel about a girl who discovers she has a brother living across town.
So everything I'd written in the other book — draft after draft, thousands of pages — was thrown out. And yet, none of it was wasted because I knew all of the characters. The inciting event was exactly the same — this guy has a child out of wedlock and doesn't tell his family about it, the girl finds out about it ... I knew all the characters, all of their relationships, their dynamics, the town they lived in — I knew the world very well. When I finally found her point of view and the in for my story, it flowed very quickly.
Why he chose to tell the story from a young girl's point of view:
I suppose it's a bit like acting with an accent, that suddenly I'm saying words I don't normally say, I'm walking differently and so, behind this facade, I'm liberated. When I was writing from a 45-year-old guy's point of view ... it's not my story and yet it was very similar to me and I couldn't find the distance for the air to breathe into it. When I finished that travel memoir, a friend of mine said to me, "What are you working on?" I said, "I'm working on this novel." He said, "Oh good. Now you can put in all the things that were too personal to put in the memoir." So in a very real way, that's true.
On the themes of infidelity and secrecy:
Infidelity is not particularly a theme that I resonate with. I like the idea of secrecy, certainly. And family secrets are very potent. Since I've been talking about this book, I've met two or three dozen people who've come up to me with secret siblings, parents who weren't their parents, and somebody knocked on their door at 40-years-old and said, I'm your brother. A reporter I talked to was the kid in my book. He was the result of a one-night affair. He had two sisters living across town and he'd never gone to meet them. He knew their every move though. All these kinds of crazy things going on.
On empathizing with a young adult audience:
I am still an outgrowth of what I was like when I was 15-years-old. We can all have those feelings of feeling unappreciated, alone and things that, in adulthood, we call childish feelings. Yet we can feel that at any given moment. With Lucy, I didn't have to mask that and be a grown up. I could just act and react from that place. She goes on this spontaneous journey simply by just reacting without thinking. The only thing that we garner by growing up is a moment of pause. [thinking], Wait, I probably shouldn't get on that train. And we don't.
On accurately portraying a young girl's point of view:
I started writing one day from her point of view and it just flew. And I didn't tell anyone I was writing it. I usually inflict a lot of my writing on my wife and I didn't tell her that I was doing it. I wrote for probably 100 pages before I even admitted to myself that I was throwing out that novel and writing a young adult book. So I didn't tell anyone, didn't talk about it, didn't do anything. I just sort of wrote this in my own little space and then I gave it to my neighbor, who's a 15-year-old girl. I said, "Would you read this?" She said, "Yeah, this sounds just like me and my friends." I went, "Oh, thank god I didn't just waste the last eight months." When I was in the bubble of it, I didn't want to hear anyone else's voice in my head because Lucy's voice was so strong and adamant.