Actor turns years of work on book into teen novel
NEW YORK — For actor and TV writer/director Andrew McCarthy, a bestselling travel memoir has been followed by a youngadult novel.
“Just Fly Away,” released late last month, centers on family secrets and is written from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl.
McCarthy’s choice in protagonist, he said during a recent interview in Manhattan, left him imagining the pushback he might face:
Still, he insisted, “This book is me.”
McCarthy, known for his roles in 1980s movies such as “Pretty in Pink” and “Less Than Zero,” recalled his high-school years as a time when he felt uncomfortably “separate.” He had few real interests, he said, and little luck with girls.
“I was always the confidant, never the boyfriend. When I was 15, I looked very young. I would stand in front of the mirror wishing I could know what I would look like in 10 years.”
His mother nudged him to audition for the school play, and he was cast as the Artful Dodger in “Oliver.”
“I finally felt like, ‘There I am,’” he said.
Readers of his best-selling travel memoir, “The Longest Way Home,” know that by his 30s, McCarthy had stopped drinking and rediscovered that feeling of “there I am” by going it alone to far-flung places. He kept a notebook and spent a year
trying to persuade a travel-magazine editor to give him a shot. He has since published dozens of travel essays and has won awards, including the 2010 Travel Journalist of the Year from the Society of American Travel Writers.
Before dedicating himself to the youngadult novel, McCarthy spent seven years working on a novel “about a married guy who had a one-night fling and had a child and spent 25 years keeping it a secret.”
Then, one day, while waiting for a plane to take off, he started writing from the point of view of his favorite character, the 15-yearold daughter.
“I was just messing around,” he said. “I would do anything to avoid writing the other book.”
The pages came easily, and he realized that “the big novel was like a dead tree in the woods, and this was a nurse tree that sucked up all the roots.”
His protagonist, Lucy Willows, lives in an unnamed New Jersey town based on Westfield, where McCarthy’s family lived until he was 15, when they moved to nearby Bernardsville. Furious at her father after learning about her secret half brother, Lucy jumps on a train to New York City and ends up on a solo journey to Maine.
McCarthy said he hadn’t read any of the recent, similarly realistic young-adult novels by the likes of John Green and Rainbow Rowell, who have become publishing juggernauts. But he has embraced the idea of writing for a teenage audience.
“I thought, if there’s truth in this, it would be a book for that extraordinary teenage moment in life because everything is so important — it’s life and death, and you’re the only one who’s ever gone through it,” he said.
McCarthy tested a draft on a teenage neighbor, who told him that Lucy’s voice sounded legitimate.
In addition to writing and directing for television, McCarthy has recently become a somewhat-reluctant stage dad: His daughter, Willow, played Matilda in the Broadway production of “Matilda the Musical,” which closed on Jan. 1.
“We went to see ‘Matilda,’ and she was like, I want to be in ‘Matilda,’” McCarthy said. “At that point, she had been the frog in the school play; she was not an actor. I was like, ‘OK, sweetheart.’ So the babysitter was looking online for all things ‘Matilda,’ and there was an open call, and Willow was like, ‘Can I go?’”
Five auditions later, she won the part, which she played for eight months.
“She was wondrous and wonderful, and she loved it,” McCarthy said. “I saw ‘Matilda’ 50 times. Luckily, it’s a great show. She gave the last performance of ‘Matilda.’ I found it very stressful. It was all the anxiety of performing but none of the release. It’s like watching your heart outside your body.”
Meanwhile, his son, Sam, has acted in a few TV shows.
“It’s everything I said would never happen to my children, and now here I am,” McCarthy said.
Recently, Sam was cast in the indie movie “All These Small Moments.” His mother will be played by Molly Ringwald, McCarthy’s co-star in “Pretty in Pink.”
“After the first day of rehearsal,” McCarthy said, “Molly emailed me and said, ‘Your son just walked away from me, and it was like watching you walk away from me 30 years ago.’
“It was very sweet.”
“Just Fly Away” (Algonquin, 272 pages, $17.95) by Andrew McCarthy