If I’d been a member of the Brat Pack, I would have wanted to have been Rob Lowe. But I was more like Andrew McCarthy.

He wasn’t handsome, nor was he a good actor. I wasn’t handsome either, or ever been an actor.

Underneath that cute shyness he was an outsider, not liked by his contemporaries, and he was resentful, and probably not a nice person.

“Early on in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the character Tom Buchanan as a ‘national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.’”

Now we know the truth.

McCarthy thought he could deal with fame, but wasn’t able to, and lived by the bottle. And this meant that once he’d peaked at a young age it was downhill. And then, by his own choice, it ended.

“Maybe you didn’t want it,” Alec Baldwin said to him on the Here’s the Thing podcast without realising he’d come closer to the core than McCarthy ever had.

I’m not sure I liked him after reading this, but he writes clearly and honestly, and afterwards I realised that we were alike after all.

He might not have been a nice person, but I suspect he might be now.