Andrew McCarthy on nostalgia, friendship and showing up

“I’m not a very nostalgic person,” Andrew McCarthy told the sold-out crowd in P.E. Monroe Auditorium at Lenoir-Rhyne University to open the Visiting Writers Series season on September 10.

It was an unexpected admission from a performer whose roles in “Pretty in Pink,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Mannequin” and other 1980s touchstones once put his face on movie screens and posters in teenage lockers.

The evening might have seemed designed for looking backward, but it was really about looking at the people sitting side by side in that room. Friendship, not nostalgia, brought McCarthy to Hickory.

The writer

McCarthy’s career continued beyond the teen-idol era, leading to directing and then a writing career that includes five books and an editorship at National Geographic Traveler.

His latest book, “Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America,” began when McCarthy took stock of friendships that had once been central to his life and realized that, somewhere amid careers, marriage, children and distance, seeing those friends had become increasingly rare.

His wife put it more plainly: his world was getting smaller. So, McCarthy did what he knew how to do and hit the road.

What began as visits with old friends grew into a nearly 10,000-mile journey across the country, where McCarthy began asking men he met along the way about their own friendships. In a West Virginia diner, as he listened to a group of men who gathered there regularly, the idea that the journey might become something more began to take shape.

“I was probably in Kentucky when I thought, oh, I have a book here,” he said. 

That willingness to recognize a signal telling him he is onto something, then follow it without knowing where it ends, has defined McCarthy’s career. When he was 15, it led him to acting. In 2004 he directed the first of many projects. Years after that, traveling in Vietnam, he picked up a pen in a hotel room in Saigon. 

“I wrote down the story of what happened to me that day,” McCarthy said. “And I just liked the way that felt, and I kept doing that. I kept traveling, and I kept writing about it.”

That evolution is part of McCarthy’s writing process. Before the program, he said he often begins a journey thinking he knows what the story will be. He knows he is getting somewhere when he stops looking for clues to support that original theory and lets the story change.

“The story morphs always,” McCarthy said. “If there are no surprises in it, then there’s no truth in it. You never end up with the first idea. You end up with the tenth idea. You learn to trust the not knowing for longer.”

The brothers

McCarthy’s first stop in “Who Needs Friends” was Baltimore, where he went unannounced to see his old friend Seve, who was struggling with severe back problems. The two reconnected, and McCarthy returned home. 

The next week he went back — unannounced. 

“Friendship is more than just once in a blue moon, right?” McCarthy told the audience. “It’s consistency.”

Brothers Allen and Mike Hammock had arrived at much the same conclusion. The brothers grew up in Missouri watching McCarthy’s movies together, including “Pretty in Pink” and “Weekend at Bernie’s,” but now live thousands of miles apart. 

They began reading McCarthy’s books about two years ago, and when Allen read about the conversation with McCarthy’s son that prompted him to reconnect with old friends, he picked up the phone.

“I called my brother because, you know, we’re always looking for things to do together as a family,” Allen said. “And we love road trips.”

When they learned McCarthy was coming to Lenoir-Rhyne, they planned a trip around the event. Allen flew from San Francisco to meet Mike, and the two made their way to Hickory. The road trip did not end there. They planned to continue to Chicago, where they had more friends to see, before returning to St. Louis.

“It’s just very much in the spirit of what McCarthy wrote about in the book,” Allen said. “We’ve got lots of friends. You go visit your friends.”

The fans

Although “Who Needs Friends” examines friendship among men, the audience gathering in Monroe offered a broader picture. The first guests arrived around 2:30 p.m., four hours before McCarthy took the stage. In the front rows sat women who encountered his movies as part of their teenage social lives — at slumber parties, in living rooms and movie theaters — with friendships forming and continuing around them. Elsewhere in the auditorium were friends whose relationships may have been newly forged through book groups, workplaces or shared interests, alongside others who had been beside one another for decades.

Even if he doesn’t fully share their nostalgia, McCarthy said he has come to understand the emotion of fans who approach him to talk about movies they first saw while coming of age, when stories can make a particularly deep impression. Those movies, he said, became part of their memories of that time.

“You’re not talking to me,” McCarthy said. “You’re talking to your own youth. And I am like the avatar of that youth. It’s a blessing.”