According to his 2012 travel memoir, The Longest Way Home, Andrew McCarthy’s acting career began when he was a freshman at NYU, and he answered an ad with this headline: “Wanted: Eighteen, Vulnerable and Sensitive.” That ad led to an audition and his role as Jacqueline Bisset’s teen lover in Class, a raunchy 1983 comedy that also helped kick off the careers of Rob Lowe and John Cusack. After McCarthy’s Brat Pack days — he’s probably best-known as Molly Ringwald’s crush Blane in Pretty in Pink — he never really gave up acting, but he gained a couple other vocations: travel writing and directing TV shows, like Orange Is the New Black. But maybe McCarthy always stayed connected to his vulnerable teenage self, because his new book, Just Fly Away, is a young adult novel told from the point of view of a smart and sensitive 15-year-old girl. The plot: When suburban teen Lucy learns that her father has another family nobody told her about, she feels too hurt and angry to deal with her parents, and flees New Jersey for her grandfather’s house in small-town Maine. Kirkus Reviews calls it a “poignant, character-driven coming-of-age novel.” McCarthy will talk about the new work at Parnassus as part of the Salon@615 author series. DANA KOPP FRANKLIN
Salon@615 With Andrew McCarthy, Author of Just Fly Away
