Actor Andrew McCarthy writing ‘Brat Pack’ era book

NEW YORK — Actor-writer-director Andrew McCarthy, a 57-year-old father of three, keeps getting asked about his “Brat Pack” years in the 1980s.

He is now ready to answer.

Grand Central Publishing announced Tuesday that McCarthy’s “Brat: An ‘80s Story” will come out next spring. Grand Central is calling the book “a revealing look at coming of age in a maelstrom, reckoning with conflicted ambition, innocence, addiction and masculinity.” McCarthy is calling it a long-delayed reckoning.

“For years people have asked me, on a near daily basis, ‘What was it like “back in the day?’ Routinely, I’d offer up any number of stock responses,” he said in a statement. “Finally I thought, ‘Let’s take a hard look under that rock.’ What I found surprised me, at times scared me, and finally made sense of a lot of seemingly disparate parts of my life.”

McCarthy was widely known in the ‘80s for such films as “Pretty In Pink,” “Less Than Zero” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and for his association, at least as seen by the media, with such contemporaries as Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald and Emilio Estevez.

The term “Brat Pack” was popularized by an unflattering New York magazine story that ran in 1985 and portrayed the young actors as shallow and self-absorbed. McCarthy has long disputed he was part of any such group, telling People magazine in 1999 that he hadn’t seen any of his famous co-stars since making “St. Elmo’s Fire.”

Over the past 30 years, McCarthy has appeared in dozens of films and TV shows, starred in the acclaimed play “Side Man,” written an introspective travel memoir that Cheryl Strayed praised as a “good book about a good man” and directed episodes of “Orange Is the New Black” and “Gossip Girl” among other programs. He has also spoken openly about past struggles, saying he began drinking at age 12.

Grand Central announced that he will write about everything from “scoring loose joints in Washington Square Park” to “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.”