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.
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.
