"Look, it is a life changer," says actor and director Andrew McCarthy. "It really is." For centuries, pilgrims of all stripes have been drawn to the 500-mile Spanish route known as Camino de Santiago, a trail that has over time come to symbolize everything from a medieval religious quest and a modern tourist experience. But the man so synonymous with a certain '80s-era shorthand (he named his last memoir "Brat") told me during a recent "Salon Talks" conversation that for him, the trek represented something uniquely precious — a chance to spend a few uninterrupted weeks with his 19-year-old son.
As McCarthy writes in "Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain," forging an adult relationship with your newly grown-up kid ("Dead to Me" actor Sam McCarthy) can be its own rough road. But as the two men — one nursing his first real heartbreak and the other retracing a journey he'd made a quarter of a century before — journey across Spain, they find a new way to relate to each other, one step at a time.
