WHO NEEDS FRIENDS

Actor-turned-author McCarthy, now in his 60s, begins with a comment from a young son who says, offhandedly, “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?” McCarthy thinks, well, he has friends, but he doesn’t see them often. The resolve, then, that drives this narrative was to go seek out friends from his hell-raising, bibulous youth and beyond, driving up and down and across the continent to check in. One visit was to a man he called his “surrogate big brother,” who had fallen on hard times, psychically speaking; though that old friend waved him off, McCarthy drove the many miles to see him all the same, to find him living as a hoarder with boxes everywhere that explained, McCarthy gamely writes, “how Jeff Bezos became a billionaire.” A modest intervention ensues before McCarthy pushes on. Friends can be as numerous as one wishes, but they require investment: McCarthy cites a study that conjectures that “it takes two hundred hours to make a good friend.” Making is one thing, keeping quite another: He marvels at an encounter in a Texas diner with a group of women who meet for lunch every Wednesday and have for time immemorial, which causes him to wonder, “Why are women just so much better at this?” The answers are various. McCarthy notes, near the end of his narrative, that while he’s met many men who have had friends for decades, he has also met “men who have no male friends at all, who can’t even conceive of the idea.” McCarthy finds hope for those friendless men when he concludes that those with whom he’s spoken allow that they’d “just never talked about this before” and might ponder doing something about it.