Actor-turned-author McCarthy, now in his 60s, begins with a comment from a young son who says, offhandedly, \u201cYou don\u2019t really have any friends, do you, Dad?\u201d McCarthy thinks, well, he has friends, but he doesn\u2019t 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 \u201csurrogate big brother,\u201d 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, \u201chow Jeff Bezos became a billionaire.\u201d 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 \u201cit takes two hundred hours to make a good friend.\u201d 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, \u201cWhy are women just so much better at this?\u201d The answers are various. McCarthy notes, near the end of his narrative, that while he\u2019s met many men who have had friends for decades, he has also met \u201cmen who have no male friends at all, who can\u2019t even conceive of the idea.\u201d McCarthy finds hope for those friendless men when he concludes that those with whom he\u2019s spoken allow that they\u2019d \u201cjust never talked about this before\u201d and might ponder doing something about it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Actor-turned-author McCarthy, now in his 60s, begins with a comment from a young son who says, offhandedly, \u201cYou don\u2019t really have any friends, do you, Dad?\u201d McCarthy thinks, well, he has friends, but he doesn\u2019t see them often. The resolve, then, that drives this narrative was to go seek out friends from his hell-raising, bibulous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5937"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}