The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  We considered staying a few extra days, to make up for the ones we had missed, but then D turned to me. “I miss the kids.”

  “Me too.”

  A few weeks after we returned home, D shook me awake in the middle of the night.

  “Andrew, I think I’ve got malaria.”

  “Huh?”

  “I think I’ve got malaria,” she repeated. “I have a shooting pain in my side, which is very typical of malaria, and the gestation period is exactly right.”

  “It’s probably the Chinese food you had for dinner.”

  “And I’m clammy.”

  I felt her forehead. It was fine. “If you’re still alive in the morning, we’ll call the doctor.”

  She groaned and rolled away from me.

  A few minutes later I heard the patter of our daughter’s feet. She climbed up into bed and snuggled down between us. Then my son appeared. “Move over, Dad.”

  Soon I could hear everyone breathing evenly as I lay awake in the dark, with everything I wanted beside me in bed. I rolled over, and a mosquito buzzed in my ear.

  In Bermuda, age nine.

  The first travel story—a page from the journal I kept on that exotic trip to Bermuda.

  The “aha” moment, as The Artful Dodger. My first and finest performance.

  On the set of Class, my first movie. Nervous and thrilled.

  Wary and apprehensive, as usual, watching filming of the prom scene during Pretty in Pink. Producer Lauren Shuler, left, and James Spader, far right. © Paramount Pictures

  Seve and I, footloose in Ireland back in the day.

  On the ice of Perito Moreno Glacier, in Patagonia, southern Argentina.

  About to be slammed by a sudden storm on a ridge above Estancia Cristina, in Patagonia—with the Upsala Glacier behind.

  In the Belén market in Iquitos, Peru, right after drinking down the “elixir.”

  Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica, before the sharks and alligators and bees.

  Colm and Margot, peeling away the years at a Heuriger in Vienna.

  At the old ballyard in Baltimore.

  Near the summit of Kilimanjaro at dawn, stopping to take notes.

  Atop Kilimanjaro—then it got difficult.

  The big moment in Dublin.

  Finally, dancing a jig.

  NOTE

  When I left the Amazon, I went to Lima, where I met up with Francesco and his wife, Birgit, for dinner. In the course of our conversation, I told him of the young girl. I also told him that several of the passengers on board had expressed interest in helping her, if someone could handle the logistics. Francesco oversaw all arrangements, transferring the girl—who was six at the time, and whose name is Doris—down the Amazon to Iquitos, and then to Lima, along with her father. After numerous medical consultations, the operation on her tongue was performed. Francesco footed the entire bill. Doris has made a full recovery and is back with her family in Hatum Posa.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  David Kuhn knew what I meant before I could articulate it, and helped me bring the idea for this book forth. Alessandra Bastagli was the first believer in the book and has been a champion and a dogged advocate throughout. Martha K. Levin and Dominick Anfuso have been unflagging in their support. Aja Pollock was meticulous. Daniella Wexler has been patient and painstaking. I would not be writing anything at all if it hadn’t been for Keith Bellows, who was the first to take a chance when an actor asked for an opportunity to write. There are others: Susan Dalsimer, Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, Nancy Novogrod, Luke Barr, Jayne Wise, Candace Bushnell, Jacqueline Carleton, Lisa Jane Persky, Stephen O’Connell, Lois Wecker, all offered insight along the way. And my gratitude goes to my family, all of them—none asked to be in a book; I hope they will accept, forgive, and understand. Finally, there would be no book without Dolores—for obvious reasons, and for some less obvious ones. I am made grateful, awed, blessed, and humbled by her in equal measure.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE LONGEST WAY HOME

  The Longest Way Home is a thoughtful and observant memoir about the travels one man must take to finally, fully, commit to D, the woman he loves. Andrew McCarthy, best known for his roles in Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire, has also nurtured a career on the side as an award winning travel writer. Faced with his impending wedding, Andrew impulsively signs up for a series of writing trips, to take place in the weeks and months approaching the big day. As his circuitous travels take him around the world—from Patagonia to Baltimore, from Kilimanjaro to the Amazon—he reflects on the meaning of his lust for travel and the ambiguities surrounding his phobia for commitment. As his travels reach their end and his wedding day approaches, Andrew’s insights, garnered from his encounters with new places and people, allow him to shed his fears and embrace the next stage of his life, without hesitation or doubt.

  TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. The Longest Way Home mixes reflections on Andrew’s life with D and his children with his observations and insights into the places he travels. How do chance encounters with people he meets and the things he sees produce changes in his thinking about his relationship with D?

  2. In part, the journey Andrew embarks on is initiated when he commits to his wedding to D. Have you ever taken a trip to somewhere new in order to prepare for a big event? Do you think Andrew’s trip is really a chance to reflect? Or is he trying to temporarily escape?

  3. One of the book’s themes is Andrew’s anxiety around, and distance from, people he isn’t familiar with. How does this isolation affect his travel habits? Do you seek out strangers when you travel, or do you avoid them? Why?

  4. On pages 16–18, Andrew described the euphoria he felt while hiking in Spain, when he discovered his true love for travel. He writes, “. . . suddenly I was smiling. It was the first time I remembered smiling since I left New York. And then I knew what was missing, what I hadn’t carried with me that morning. Fear.” What is the fear he describes in this passage? What allowed him to overcome it?

  5. On page 25, Andrew describes his ambivalence between his commitment to his family and his desire to keep himself separate, to travel. Compare this ambiguity with his reflection upon leaving Kilimanjaro on page 227. Has Andrew cured his wanderlust? Or simply found a better way to balance his conflicting impulses? What do you think is symbolized by the lone Masai man in this passage?

  6. On page 58, while on the estancia in Patagonia, Andrew writes, “My feeling isn’t so much of nostalgia for a past I never knew, it is more of an active yearning, an anxiety that these people knew something of how to live, that they possessed information that I need.” What is it about these past lives that he so admires? What do you think some of the lessons they have to teach might be?

  7. Andrew articulates one of the defining themes of the book, and his relationship with D, on page 63, before leaving for the Amazon. “Loving someone, she will say, is the only thing that matters and is worth the price of relinquishing control.” Do you side more with D or with Andrew? Do you fear the vulnerability that comes with loving someone, or do you embrace it? Why?

  8. While in the Amazon Andrew is forced to spend much of his time surrounded by strangers. How does the trip affect his standard role of aloofness? Does he succeed in shirking some of his defensive, guarded behavior? How?

  9. Andrew’s trip to Costa Rica is full of encounters with ex-pats who have settled into a quiet life far away from home. He claims part of his motivation is to “take a good look at those who did escape and to challenge my own propensity toward utopian fantasies that can corrode any chance at real happiness.” Do you agree about the harm such fantasies can cause? What encourages Andrew to let go of his own?

  10. One underlying theme of the book is the conflicts Andrew has with his father and his son. What lessons is he trying to learn from the story of his father’s life, which he can only understand as an adult with a child of his own? Do you think Andrew has learned these lessons?

  11.
While in Baltimore, Andrew’s friend Seve imparts this piece of wisdom, “ ‘Let me tell you something, my friend.’ He blows a big puff of apple-scented smoke and continues very slowly. ‘The best thing you could do is show up.’ ” What do you make of Andrew’s assessment of this phrase? Do you agree with his take on what it means to be committed?

  12. Mt. Kilimanjaro is one of the most popular destinations in the world, and a focus of Andrew’s trip. What does his climb, up and down, symbolize for Andrew’s journey? What has he learned by the time he leaves the mountain?

  13. After the long journey around the world, Andrew’s story ends with a picture-perfect and joyous wedding. How did your own perception of Andrew as a person evolve throughout the book? Did you find yourself thinking differently of his trip as it ended from when it began?

  14. How does each stage in Andrew’s journey, each chapter, represent a stage in his growth toward commitment? What does each location mean to you, in terms of his overall development toward his marriage to D?

  ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB

  1. Andrew visits seven exotic locales in search of answers about himself and his commitments. Using travel guides, Google Maps, or an atlas, plan a seven-stop trip, designed to help you work through a problem of your own. What about each place do you think would help you to grow or change? What do you think of travel as therapy?

  2. Other talented writers also cover many of the locales in Andrew’s journey. Take a look at books by Paul Theroux, or Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, Running the Amazon by Joe Kane, or even at Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Discuss the similarities in theme and description between these accounts and Andrew’s own.

  3. If you somehow haven’t seen it, or if it’s been awhile, watch St. Elmo’s Fire with your book club. As Andrew writes, “In [St. Elmo’s Fire] because I was so actively living out my personal vacillations on-screen, I felt free—for the only time in my young life—to move fully toward a success I had decided I wanted.” Compare the actor Andrew to the author Andrew. What similarities do you see? Do you have a greater appreciation for his acting after having read his book? How do you feel about his writing after seeing him act?

  AUTHOR Q & A

  Where did the idea for the book come from?

  I was sitting in a cab on my way to the airport, heading to Patagonia for a magazine story. (Patagonia turned out to be where an early section of the book is placed.) My then fiancée and I had just decided to finally get married, after four years of being engaged. We were feeling very close—the way people do when they make decisions like that, and I was really sad to be leaving. But in another part of myself I was thrilled to be going. I felt like a split personality, and I wondered how I would ever reconcile those two parts of myself. That’s really the whole essence of the book.

  The book reads like a love song to your wife. What was her reaction to it?

  It’s funny, the book was never “will he or won’t he” get married, it’s more “how will he” get married. My wife is well aware of my tendencies to separate, tendencies that I think are fairly common with men, and women for that matter (“It’s not you, it’s me”). The journey of the book is a trying to come to terms with just that dilemma—how do we come together and remain individual? There’s a lot of outward travel to some fairly exotic locales, but the real journey is inward. So to try to answer your question, the book is really my search and my wife acts as a compass from which I radiate—she was happy with how it ended.

  How does your family feel about your constant travel?

  It’s an interesting issue. Because I think the very act of travel is a kind of infidelity.

  Explain that.

  I mean solo travel. Often now I travel with my family and I love it, but at heart, I’m a solitary traveler. And that kind of travel is an emotional leaving behind and setting out, searching for something—often I don’t know what that something is. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, a hunch, sometimes it’s even a knowing, but whatever the sensation, it’s private and intimate between the traveler and the world.

  All right, so how and why exactly does an actor become a travel writer?

  It’s not your normal career trajectory. It’s a question I’m asked often, obviously. I understand it, but to me it’s completely natural. I suppose they both tap into a similar expression of creativity, for lack of a better word. Both things just feel like an extension of myself. I’m lucky in that my passions are my jobs.

  But how did you begin the writing?

  Between acting jobs I was traveling a great deal, alone—in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, wherever I felt like going, often for little conscious reason. I began to try to keep a journal, but every time I went to read it I felt embarrassed. It seemed indulgent and silly. It captured only a strange fraction of my experiences. One day in Saigon a young guy on a scooter offered to show me around, so I climbed on the back of his bike. I wrote down what happened, the day we spent together, I wrote the scene as it took place. And it seemed to capture the essence of my experience in Saigon in a way my journal couldn’t. Once I put the experiences into story form, it liberated what I was trying to say. It felt very organic and natural. I mean, I’m an actor—I knew about dialogue, character, a sense of pace, setting the scene, the arc of a story. And I kept doing it. When I returned from my trips these scenes found a place in the back of my dresser drawer—for years I did this.

  Eventually I got it into my mind that I wanted to try to put it out there. I met the editor of National Geographic Traveler magazine and eventually he agreed to give me a shot. It took off from there.

  As you’ve become more and more involved with travel writing as a profession, what other writers working in the field do you admire? What classic authors do you think have the best depictions of what it’s like to travel?

  Paul Theroux’s travel writing changed my life. His books opened my eyes to a way of travel and looking at travel that I had not considered. The value of loneliness, the willingness to be uncomfortable, the importance of paying attention, these things and many more woke me up to parts of myself I had run from. I also love Pico Iyer’s self-aware sense of detached investment. It gives his books a dreamlike quality that really captures something about extended travel, especially extended solo travel.

  Do you find much cross-pollination in your two careers?

  I do. More and more. Naturally as an actor you’re very aware of behavior and on the lookout for telling details. That obviously comes in very handy for writing. I’ve also been doing a fair amount of directing in the last several years, and that detachment and distance really help. When acting you’re viewing the story from a very subjective point of view, while with directing you’re always aware of the obligation to tell the entire story. In my writing I find both perspectives come into play. I immerse myself in a scene, and then pull way back to give perspective and make sure that the details are in service of the ultimate story I want to tell.

  What advice would you give to an amateur traveler, looking for a unique or off-the-beaten-path traveling experience?

  I always encourage people to ask for help on the road. Making oneself vulnerable is the surest way to a connection that makes for memorable travel. No one has ever refused me help while on the road. No matter how low-down the place might be, everyone has a pride in where they live, and they want you to experience it in a good light. I’ve ended up around some pretty interesting dinner tables simply because I asked for directions.

  What’s next?

  I’m just finishing a novel that I’ve been working on for a while. And I’m due to do some traveling—I have a story in India, and another down in Brazil that I need to do.

  ANDREW McCARTHY is a writer, actor, and director. He is an editor at large for National Geographic Traveler and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. The Society of American Travel Writers named him the Travel Journalist of the Year in 2010 and presented him with their Grand Award in 2
011. McCarthy made his acting debut at nineteen and has appeared in dozens of films, including Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, and The Joy Luck Club. He lives in New York.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Andrew-McCarthy

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  NOTE TO READERS:

  Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.