The Roads Less Traveled

On a winding journey from Kentucky to Texas in December 2023, the actor, director, and travel writer Andrew McCarthy, newly 61, was driving through his past. Ostensibly on a trip to reconnect with friends who had left New York for jobs and lives elsewhere, McCarthy ignored the common routes that any driving app would suggest, venturing away from interstate highways and onto the blacktop backroads of the Deep South. That’s when his journey of rediscovery began to reveal places he had never considered visiting, and which, like him, can’t easily be separated from their past—where the past is never past, to paraphrase William Faulkner. He found the Mississippi Delta particularly fascinating, at once enchanting, intimidating, and illuminating.  

McCarthy’s first stop in Mississippi was Tupelo, where he visited Elvis’s favorite booth at Johnnie’s Drive-In.

“What I was interested in is how the past is still influencing the present, and how the present can be changed by our interpretation of what happened in the past,” he tells Delta over a video call from his home in New York, where he lives with his family.

He’s been thinking about the past a lot lately, but not as nostalgia. For his recent documentary Brats, McCarthy visited the actors who, along with himself, were tagged with the moniker “Brat Pack” as they rose to fame in the 1980s. The star power rivals the movies they made, with segments featuring Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, and the other stars of blockbusters like The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. Although McCarthy hadn’t seen his former co-stars in three decades, he found that the Brat Pack media hype, oversaturation, and eventual decline had impacted them all in different ways. In his own life, acting began to mean less, and he lost the interest and fire he felt his first time on stage at fifteen. He started to travel more, and the more he ventured out of the comfort zone he’d built around himself, the less fear he felt. 

“I found traveling really changed my place in the world, and it helped me realize how much fear had dominated so much of my life,” he says. “When I was walking across Spain on the old Camino de Santiago years ago, I had this sort of white-light experience in the middle of a wheat field in Spain about that.” He kept traveling, and eventually began writing about his experiences. To his surprise, he found the same feeling he’d experienced discovering acting as a teenager. “I just went, ‘Oh, there I am.’”

Success as a writer came quickly, too. National Geographic made him an editor at large, and the Society of American Travel Writers named him Travel Journalist of the Year in 2010 for his work in publications like The New York Times, The Atlantic and Men’s Journal. His first travel memoir, The Longest Way Home, landed him on the NYT bestseller list, a feat he has repeated three times—most recently for Walking With Sam, his 2023 memoir about walking the 500-mile Camino de Santiago again, this time with his son as he neared adulthood. In fact, his extensive book tour promoting Walking With Sam brought him back through Mississippi again in March. McCarthy was the featured literary guest for the weekly, statewide public radio show, Thacker Mountain Radio, which was recorded at the Gertrude Ford Center, followed the next day with a book signing at Square Books. 

 Square Books in Oxford hosted a book signing for McCarthy in March.

As far afield as he traveled, though, Mississippi had long been a blank spot on his map of America. Not only had he never visited, but no one in his circle of friends and family had, either. But now, driving backroads across the country to reconnect with old friends, the prospect of driving straight into the heart of the region felt daunting and intimidating. So, naturally, he did.“Mississippi seems so distinctly itself,” he says. “Obviously, in so much of the Delta particularly, there’s not a ton of excess money bouncing around. When there’s not money to shield things, things are pretty exposed for what they are. There’s something really attractive about something that is just utterly itself, whether it’s people or a place.”

Under the iconic Crossroads sign in Clarksdale, one of McCarthy’s favorite towns to visit.

Starting off with a hazy sense of what he aimed to find, McCarthy first visited Tupelo and the birthplace of Elvis Presley, then stopped at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford. Everywhere he went, people suggested new places to go—and so, he went. “I had something about the blues vaguely in my mind, and it kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding, and I thought, you could spend an extraordinary amount of time here and it would still be unfolding and still be a mystery to me.”

Some of the places he ate along the way stand out the most among his favorite experiences, which will surprise few in the Delta. Joe’s Hot Tamales, or The White Front Place in Rosedale, as well as Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville and Walnut Hills in Vicksburg, all made his best-of list. 

McCarthy spent a good deal of his stay in Clarksdale, where one night he was one of three paying customers watching Lucious Spiller perform at Red’s Lounge. Still, he walked away in awe. “They just gave it up for two hours, and it was just three random people, me and this couple from Ohio, and these musicians who just were there for the love of it,” he says. “That kind of generosity and spirit, and the history of the blues, it’s so deep. It was one of the most memorable nights of my life.”

The duality of life experiences in the Delta and the disparity of histories, which rarely ceases to create a sort of dissonance, struck him most profoundly when he reached Money. Seeing the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery and the landing on the Tallahatchie River associated with the lynching of Emmett Till were powerful to witness. 

“It’s still such a fraught, complicated place,” he says, “and I don’t have any pretense that I understand something deeply there. It’s like that great Eugene O’Neill line: ‘The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too.’ And that seems like Mississippi to me. It’s alive and it’s there. Emmett Till seemed very much alive. That was a haunting place to me.”

So, what did he distill from witnessing the complexities of life and his own experiences in Mississippi? He’s still unraveling the meaning as he nears completion of his next book, due in 2025, a recounting of his trip to see old friends—but what he experienced in the Delta plays an outsized role in the story, he says. 

Seeing the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery in Money was a profound experience for McCarthy.

“The best of travel just makes you childlike in your sense of wonder again, and it’s a very contagious quality. When I would talk to people [in Mississippi] at first, I’d be invisible. And then when I’d be engaged, then they would get engaged, and then both of you leave better for the encounter. And that’s all you want. That’s what connection is.” Whatever conclusion he ultimately draws, chances are, he’ll be back. “I ask people, ‘Have you ever been to Mississippi?’ I’m like, ‘You need to go to Mississippi,’” he says. “They’re going, ‘Really?’ And I go, ‘No, really. Mississippi is unbelievable.’”