An intimate, funny, and poignant New York Times bestseling travel memoir following award-winning author and actor Andrew McCarthy as he walks the Camino de Santiago with his son Sam.

When Andrew McCarthy’s eldest son began to take his first steps into adulthood, McCarthy found himself wishing time would slow down. Looking to create a more meaningful connection with Sam before he fled the nest, as well as recreate his own life-altering journey decades before, McCarthy decided the two of them should set out on a trek like few others: 500 miles across Spain’s Camino de Santiago.

Over the course of the journey, the pair traversed an unforgiving landscape, having more honest conversations in five weeks than they’d had in the preceding two decades.  Discussions of divorce, the trauma of school, McCarthy’s difficult relationship with his own father, fame, and Flaming Hot Cheetos threatened to either derail their relationship or cement it.  Walking With Sam captures this intimate, candid and hopeful expedition as the father son duo travel across the country and towards one another.

Fans of Patti Smith’s Just Kids and Rob Lowe’s Stories I Only Tell My Friends will love this beautifully written, entertaining, and emotionally honest memoir by an actor, director, and author who found his start as an 80s Brat pack member — the inspiration for the Hulu documentary Brats, written and directed by Andrew McCarthy.

Most people know Andrew McCarthy from his movie roles in Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Less than Zero, and as a charter member of Hollywood’s Brat Pack. That iconic group of ingenues and heartthrobs included Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, and Demi Moore, and has come to represent both a genre of film and an era of pop culture.

In his memoir Brat: An ’80s Story, McCarthy focuses his gaze on that singular moment in time. The result is a revealing look at coming of age in a maelstrom, reckoning with conflicted ambition, innocence, addiction, and masculinity. New York City of the 1980s is brought to vivid life in these pages, from scoring loose joints in Washington Square Park to skipping school in favor of the dark revival houses of the Village where he fell in love with the movies that would change his life.

Filled with personal revelations of innocence lost to heady days in Hollywood with John Hughes and an iconic cast of characters, Brat is a surprising and intimate story of an outsider caught up in a most unwitting success.

The debut novel from Andrew McCarthy—actor, director, and bestselling author of Brat: An 80s Story—is a powerful story about family secrets, first love, the limits of forgiveness, and finding your way in the world.

When fifteen-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a secret child from a brief affair, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her family. How could her father have betrayed them like this? How could her mother forgive him? And why isn’t her sister rocked by the news the way Lucy is? Lucy can’t bring herself to tell her friends, and when she tries to confide in her boyfriend, he doesn’t understand. Fed up with everyone around her and desperate for answers, Lucy runs away to Maine—the home of her mysteriously estranged grandfather—to get to the bottom of her family’s secrets and lies.

“A soulful and searching book. Vibrant and elegant…McCarthy’s prose shines with intelligence and intimacy. One feels pulled along…the book gaining momentum and meaning page by page” (Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review).

With absorbing honesty and an irrepressible taste for adventure, award-winning travel writer and actor Andrew McCarthy takes us on a deeply personal journey played out amid some of the world’s most evocative locales. Unable to commit to his fiancée of nearly four years—and with no clear understanding of what’s holding him back—McCarthy finds himself at a crossroads, plagued by doubts that have clung to him for a lifetime. Though he ventures from the treacherous slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro to an Amazonian riverboat and the dense Costa Rican rain forests, McCarthy’s real journey is one of the spirit. Disarmingly likable, McCarthy isn’t afraid to bare his soul on the page, and what emerges is an intimate memoir of self-discovery and an unforgettable love song to the woman who would be his wife.