Walking with Andrew McCarthy

Happy Launch Day to Andrew McCarthy

Get your copy of WALKING WITH SAM

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An intimate, funny, and poignant travel memoir following New York Times bestselling author and actor Andrew McCarthy as he walks the Camino de Santiago with his son Sam.

Enjoy our interview:

Lisa Niver:

Hello. I’m so excited and honored to be here today with author and actor and incredible travel writer, Andrew McCarthy. Hi, Andrew.

Andrew McCarthy:

Thanks very much.

Lisa Niver:

I so enjoyed being at the travel show with you and listening to you talk about your new book. Congratulations.

Andrew McCarthy:

Thanks very much. Thank you.

Lisa Niver:

Tell us a little bit about your brand-new book because if I’m right, this is book number four?

Andrew McCarthy:

It is book number four. It’s called Walking With Sam: A Father, A Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain. It’s a walk I took across the old Camino de Santiago in northern Spain, and it was a walk I’d done first 25 years earlier and a real life-changing experience for me when I did that. I had a moment, a white light experience in the middle of a field of wheat, a sobbing break down where I realized how much fear had dominated my life. I never knew fear was even a factor in my life until that moment of its first absence, and there was suddenly space and I felt like myself.

My wife is Irish, she has all these good Irish sayings, and one of them is, I felt like myself from the toes up, and in that field of wheat I felt like myself from the toes up in a very real way and a way I hadn’t before, and that changed my life. It started me traveling the world, it’s what led to me becoming a travel writer.

That first journey was a real life changer for me and the Camino was something I’d always wanted to do again. And my son was 19 and beginning his own life out in the world, and I didn’t want our relationship to end. When I was 17 I left home and my relationship in essence ended with my dad and that was one of the larger regrets of my life, and I didn’t want that to happen.

So, it was a journey by trying to rewrite how our relationship is cast as opposed to parent/child into sort of adults, seeing each other for who we really are as opposed to seeing the dynamic that exists between parent and child. It was a profound experience. I knew the first time it was so profound, I thought something might happen the second time as well, and we weren’t let down. The Camino has a way of doing that. The Camino, if you just keep walking has a way of sort of teaching you what needs to be taught.

Lisa Niver:

The Camino is a pilgrimage route. How did it get started? And why do people do these walking journeys?

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