Actor, director and writer Andrew McCarthy (The Longest Way Home) focuses on his first decade as a young actor in this insightful and intimate memoir, examining "a time that has been willfully ignored by me for so long." He was 19 when he co-starred with Rob Lowe and Jacqueline Bisset in Class, and although that film fizzled, he quickly found popularity with hits St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink, Mannequin and Weekend at Bernie's. "I'd already started to develop a mask of aloof detachment that brought me some distance from the acute fear I felt in many situations," McCarthy writes. He also self-medicated his anxieties with pot, prescription drugs, cocaine and especially alcohol.
For a very private person, McCarthy is surprisingly open about his insecurities, isolation, alcoholism and strained interactions with his father ("Money would grow to define our relationship," he writes, "and his hunger for cash would not be satisfied"). He had an "uneasy alliance" with St. Elmo's Fire director Joel Schumacher, and that marked the time he began drinking alone, but his confident performance made him into a leading man. It also brought him and an expandable number of cast mates the label of "Brat Pack." The dismissive label seemed to carry more weight in McCarthy's mind. After more than three decades, he finally embraces the term: "It was a stigma that ultimately transformed into a loving moniker, a term of great and enduring affection."
Brat is a courageous and very public self-analysis of a very successful but unhappy decade in Hollywood's fast lane. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant