From Brat Pack to backpack

Pretty much the least interesting thing there is to know about Andrew McCarthy? He was a charter member of Hollywood's Brat Pack.

The most interesting thing about that? That he ever belonged to anything. Or anyone, for that matter.

"How many things had I walked away from in my life because I hadn't been able to commit?" McCarthy, 49, asks, not at all rhetorically, in the opening pages of "The Longest Way Home," his startlingly original new memoir.

Unlike fellow Brat Packer Rob Lowe's recent nonstop dish-athon (and those of just about every other Hollywood memoirist), McCarthy doesn't regale readers with the many juicy roles he turned down over a three-decade career -- or the many starlets he didn't.

Instead, "The Longest Way Home" is a lyrical, yet unsparing account of the extraordinary lengths that McCarthy, the consummate ensemble player in such 1980s cinematic touchstones as "St. Elmo's Fire," "Less Than Zero" and -- let us all bow our heads in respect -- "Weekend at Bernie's" (I and II), went on to discover and ultimately confront his commitment demons.

"I was writing the book, in a large way, to solve this sort of personal dilemma I had," McCarthy said recently by phone. He was talking about the stranger-than-any-fiction story that begins with him getting engaged to the mother of his young daughter (he also has a son by his first marriage) and then instantly becoming a serial bolter who heads out solo to such far-flung spots as Patagonia and the Amazon.

"The book," he said, "isn't really a travel book at all." Still, "The Longest Way Home" is organized as an arc of travel essays, and some very good ones at that.

He's now an editor-at-large at National Geographic Traveler, and his work pops up everywhere from the Atlantic to Bon Appetit and even won him the Society of American Travel Writers' "Travel Journalist of the Year Award" in 2010.

Say what?! Blane, the preppy heartthrob from "Pretty in Pink," can just plop himself down in a snake-infested rain forest in an off-the-grid area of Costa Rica known as "the Osa" (Chapter 4 in the book)? And nobody blinks twice?

"Sometimes people recognize me, and it opens doors in ways I would not be welcomed otherwise," admitted McCarthy.

"If I say I'm from National Geographic, people clam up or just start quoting stats," McCarthy said of those he meets while traveling. "I try not to pull out my pad and act differently around them. Instead, I run off to the bathroom a lot to write things down. People probably think I have a prostate problem."

One problem probably will never go away completely, McCarthy says: "I have that weird push-pull where I want to talk to you and not want to talk to you."

Still somewhat emotionally lost in his early 30s, he felt pulled to retrace a pilgrimage through Spain he'd read a book about. Somewhere along that 500-mile route of blistered feet and psyche, he writes, "my pack felt lighter. ... Through travel, I began to grow up."

But would he ever grow up enough to come home and finally marry "D," as he refers to his fiancée in print? That's the through-line to the book, which McCarthy says occurred to him as he almost maniacally began lining up travel-writing assignments even as he took steps to officially settle down.