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Nonfiction Views: Walking With Sam, by Andrew McCarthy, and the week's new nonfiction [1]

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Date: 2023-08-22  

If you’ve read my book diaries over the years here on Daily Kos, you may have gleaned a couple of facts about me. First, I love travel, and second, I’m not particularly interested in books about family dynamics and parenting. So here comes Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain, a book by the actor Andrew McCarthy, who first rose to fame in the Brat Pack movies of the 1980s, and who has also had a parallel career as a travel writer. In fact, his 2012 travel book, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down, is one of my favorites in the travel narrative genre. But I don’t know...this new book sounded kinda, well, family-ish.

I picked it up anyway, and I loved it.

Over 25 years ago, Andrew McCarthy walked the Camino de Santiago, the 500 mile pilgrimage path across northern Spain from the Basque village of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to the shrine of the Saint James in Santiago de Compostela. It was a meaningful, significant experience for him.

When I was a young man and became very successful in the movies very quickly, I harbored a notion that I had not earned my accomplishments, that I hadn’t done the requisite work, that it was all merely a fluke, that I didn’t deserve it….Whether any of this contained truth is debatable, but that it burrowed under my skin and became my adopted perception of myself there is little doubt. Walking across the Camino de Santiago a quarter century ago challenged all that. It hadn’t been my conscious intent to reclaim the narrative of my own life, yet that’s what happened.

McCarthy’s family life has had its disheartening times. His first marriage ended in divorce. They had been youthful sweethearts, involved on and off for twenty years before finally getting married. But as he wrote in that earlier book, The Longest Way Home,

I knew she was frustrated. I felt like I had to leave 20 percent of myself outside just to walk in the door of our marriage….It seemed that instead of our marriage being the beginning of our life together, it had been the culmination. The subsequent birth of our son was its finest moment. We loved each other, but together, we were under a rock.

That son was Sam, who was born sickly and not expected to survive. The Longest Way Home is made up of various chapters describing adventures from Patagonia to Kenya to Vienna to the Amazon (all places I’ve been), but thematically, as suggested by the subtitle ‘One Man’s Quest for the Courage to Settle Down’, it is about his struggle to balance his restless, loner spirit with love, marriage and family. That book begins with him meeting his second wife and their journey from friendship to marriage. Threaded throughout is his ambivalence, his draw towards the escape of travel, against his deepening love of his new wife and growing family (they had two children together.)

For his entire life, Sam has bounced between the two households of his mother and of McCarthy and his wife. McCarthy had a good relationship with him, but as Sam grew into manhood, 18 and then 19, and as McCarthy found his thoughts returning to that earlier trek, he developed a desire to make the trip once again, but this time with his son. He broaches the idea.

Dangerous business. Dangerous to try and re-experience a pivotal time in your earlier life, and dangerous to believe that your son can have an equally significant experience. But Sam, after going through a serious break-up, agrees to the trip.

The book is a delight. It is a good travel narrative: McCarthy is an astute observer of landscapes, of architecture and of people. There are some wonderful characters met along the pilgrimage trail. The back and forth between father and teenage son is a high-wire act, sometimes thrilling and accomplished, sometimes seeming on the brink of disaster. The book is comprised of short chapters, titled and built around some phrase spoken by one or the other: “I am about to get so sick of you”; “It’s significantly better”; “When did you know”; “More harm than good”; “I hope this lasts.”

You won’t find celebrity gossip. The only time its mentioned that someone recognized Andrew McCarthy is when a couple wants to take a photo with him staged like the poster of the movie Weekend At Bernie’s. And the fact that Sam has pursued an acting career himself is only mentioned in passing. (Sam McCarthy was the character Charlie Harding in the Netflix series Dead to Me, and played a son to another former Brat Packer, Molly Ringwold, in the 2018 movie All These Small Moments.

Yes, you will find a lot of family dynamics, thoughts about parenting, and teenage angst, all the things I don’t usually go for. But McCarthy is such an engaging and honest writer, the setting in which the interactions between father and son play out is so interesting, that I was completely drawn in.

There were so many times as I read the book that I returned to gaze at the front cover image, seen on the left in the picture that heads this diary. The picture seemed to perfectly capture much of the tone of the book: the slight look of resignation and hard-earned wisdom in the face of Andrew McCarthy, the edgy look of impatience and boredom seeping into the expression of his son, the distance between them. Other times, I would turn to the second photograph, on the inside back flap of the book jacket: father with his arm around his son, both of them smiling broadly, and for much of the book I found that photo annoyed me: it just didn’t seem to reflect the dynamics of what was transpiring in their journey together.

But it is a tribute to McCarthy’s writing, the arc of his narrative, his insight and openness and honesty, and to the engaging personality of Sam, that by the end of the book my mind had completely flipped, and that second, smiling photo seemed an equally perfect capture of the journey.

THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION

All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)

We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/22/2188365/-Nonfiction-Views-Walking-With-Sam-by-Andrew-McCarthy-and-the-week-s-new-nonfiction

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