With a road atlas in the passenger seat, Andrew McCarthy bailed from the East Coast and tore across the United States looking for friendship.
The resulting book, Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America, documents his jagged journey through various one-horse towns from coast to coast, where he ambushes any dude he can find, young or old, about their own close friendships, or lack thereof.
“I set out on this trip to combat my own encroaching sensation of separateness that I felt was beginning to impinge on my life, to limit my experiences,” McCarthy writes. “Quietude seeping toward isolation was beginning to limit the vista of my experiences.”
Actually, it was McCarthy’s own son who triggered the adventure. One day, his kid asked him: “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”
It wasn’t true. But it hit a nerve enough to send McCarthy across the whole country in search of several old friends he hadn’t seen in years. As he began to quiz people along the way, he realized he was already writing a book.
Many people, perhaps millions, know McCarthy from his films in the 1980s and beyond. But soon thereafter, he became a travel writer and never really stopped.
“I’ve often sought and found answers to my questions on the road,” McCarthy writes. “Travel has, in many ways, been the university of my life.”
It’s no wonder he became a travel writer. Travel taught McCarthy about himself, his place in the world and his relations to others, especially his old friends.
“Experience tells me that the farther from home I go, the more at home in myself I tend to feel,” he writes.
On the road, we learn that McCarthy’s habits are replaced by curiosity. Certainty yields to inquisition. Across the backwater of the American landscape, he rolls in like Clint Eastwood’s solitary man of mystery in the spaghetti westerns, but landing in dumpy motels or hideous convenience store/gas-station combos, where 64-ounce Big Gulps are the norm.
In pure Paul Theroux fashion, he turns every random encounter into source material, peppering men with questions about their comrades: Do they have any close friends? For how long? Why can’t many men really open up and be vulnerable, or simply hold space for each other the way women can? These encounters happen in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Rocky Mountains and every despair-ridden hinterland and dust-blown stopover in-between.
Nearly every time, McCarthy was surprised by the openness he found. People had never contemplated the quality of their friendships, out loud, to a stranger.
In Brookville, Ohio, he meets Lew and Bobby, buddies for 60 years, whose friendship only gets better with age. They offer wise words, opening up with a peaceful gentleness that McCarthy finds “almost unsettling.” The two lifelong friends school McCarthy on what it takes to become truly comfortable in one’s own skin.
In the boarded-up storefronts and taped-over windows of Clarksville, Mississippi, McCarthy encounters Dan and Chuck, the latter of whom operates a motel with his wife. The two men are lifelong friends. Their fathers were childhood friends. They’re tight, but they’ve never talked about their friendship to anyone else before McCarthy showed up.
The book is filled with similar encounters. Isolated goth kids in the rural south. Drunks at truck stops. Macho ranchers and mountain men. All of whom open up in varying degrees to McCarthy, a traveling stranger, about ego, intimacy or why male friendship seems to be in steep decline across the country.
The reader takes away a reinvigorated appreciation, not just for male friendship, but also for road atlases.
Andrew McCarthy will be in conversation with Matthew Félix, 6pm, Friday, March 27, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera.
