Andrew McCarthy's 10,000-mile quest to rediscover male friendship in America

Early on in Andrew McCarthy's latest travelogue, "Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America," a scene unfolds in which the actor-turned-bestselling author pays an announced visit to Seve (nickname for "Stephen"), a lifelong friend suffering from chronic back pain that's rendered him unable to get out much. Seve has let the detritus of life pile up around him - literally - with delivery packages and plastic-wrapped clothes overrunning his tiny Baltimore apartment. McCarthy, who's road-tripped from his home in New York City, proceeds cautiously, stepping gently around the mess and breaking down boxes. It's a fragile moment, if an uncompromising one, revealing the ways in which many of us have the tendency to sometimes hide the rawest, most shameful facets of our deepest selves from those who know and love them best.

"What had actually happened to my friendships?" McCarthy wonders. "Were they still there, as I claimed? Did I even want them? Or need them? What did I get from them, anyway? What did I have to offer them? How did friendship affect my place in the world?"

It's a query that McCarthy, who came of age - and amassed megawatt fame - as a 1980s heartthrob in films like "Class" and "Pretty in Pink" before transitioning to feted author, longs to address. And so, he does. In "Who Needs Friends," his third soul-baring travel memoir, McCarthy embarks on a 10,000-mile, six-weeks-long Odyssean quest, crisscrossing the continental United States to repair and restore Platonic male relationships left to wither, not by intention or design, but by virtue of the unavoidable ways in which work, family and geography - and, yes, the internet - rupture the meaningful connections we deem most precious and transformative in our lives. McCarthy readily confesses he's "very much a loner, quiet and pensive - and yet he craves attachment. He considers Seve "a surrogate big brother." And they hadn't seen each other in years. How had he let that happen?

Sensing he's as much to blame for the lack of contact as the guys on the other end, McCarthy sets out to revive these atrophied friendships, to make them whole again, to make them new - and to feel less alone. "Men have no monopoly on loneliness, but it is a massive issue," says McCarthy over an early morning Zoom from his Manhattan apartment. "And it's something a lot of people, particularly men, don't want to admit, because to them it means weakness."

As he drives in "Who Needs Friends," mostly solo, from the East Coast to the West, McCarthy - who "hates driving" and completed the 22-state trek in short bursts - mines themes ranging from isolation to parenthood in the modern age, excavating secrets not only about the men who helped shape his adult life, but the defining culture of male camaraderie across America. In the casual, observational fashion of Alexis de Tocqueville, or perhaps more like Steinbeck, McCarthy talks to men, young and old, at road stops and tourist traps from Atlantic City to a Lake Tahoe casino, interviewing them about what Aristotle calls "the nature of the friendship."

What McCarthy discovers is that in a society obsessed with male bravado, one that far too often values virility above vulnerability, it's the knocking down of emotional walls that enables male friendships to thrive. Whether it's Eddie, a friend McCarthy met in high school who resides in Alto, Texas, or Larry, a buddy in Austin, honesty and confession form the bedrock of true male intimacy. Trust is key. But friendship extends beyond trust, McCarthy learns - it's about laying bare the deepest, darkest details of who we actually are.