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Andrew McCarthy’s dilemma began three years ago, when the actor and director’s then 21-year-old son, Sam, was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor strumming his electric guitar, telling a story about a friend’s romantic follies. McCarthy was at the kitchen table, laughing. Then Sam stopped strumming and looked up.

“You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”

“I have friends, Sam,” McCarthy told his son. “I just don’t see them, but I know they’re there. That’s enough.” He’s recounting the scene now, calling from Dublin where he’s directing a stage production of The Crucible. “Sam considered me—probably knew I was full of shit—then graciously accepted my answer with a brief nod.” Sam went off to see his girlfriend. McCarthy sat there, spinning.

It’s a strange problem for a man like McCarthy to have. He emerged as a defining face of 1980s Hollywood, with star turns in Pretty in Pink, Less than Zero, and St. Elmo’s Fire that cemented his status in the Brat Pack. He went on to become an award-winning travel writer and made the transition to director, with credits like Orange Is the New Black. A man with that résumé, you’d figure, had people.

His wife had delivered her own verdict a few months before Sam’s, less gently: “Your life is getting smaller.” McCarthy picked up the phone and started calling his oldest friends. Every one of them, for various legitimate reasons, canceled. “I didn’t want the next time I saw my friend to be at his funeral,” he says. So he said, “Fuck this,” and got in the car.

What started as a trip to see a few of his oldest friends—Seve, Matthew, Eddie, among them—turned into a journey across 22 states and the book Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America (Grand Central Publishing). McCarthy drove the whole thing in a succession of rental Chevy Malibus in various stages of repair. (It is in no way an endorsement of the Chevy Malibu, as it turns out.)

Along the way, he stopped at diners and coffee shops, eventually telling people he was writing a book about male friendship and seeing what happened. Nobody left. “I was ready to wrap every one of those conversations up,” he says. “Every guy just kept talking.

They would say, ‘I have never talked about this before.’ I could tell.” Some of it was the stranger-on-a-plane dynamic, he figures. But mostly he thinks men are starving for exactly this conversation and almost never get the chance to have it. McCarthy cites data showing that more than one in seven American men currently have no close friends and that male friendship is in steep decline. (Another stat that backs this up: This year, searches for “how to make friends as an adult” hit an all-time high on Google.)

McCarthy finds some surprising friendships on the road. In a diner in Ohio he spends a morning with two retired cops, Lew and Bobby, who’d been close for 50 years. They’d had jobs, McCarthy says, that required them to be hard-asses. Bobby tells McCarthy, with no apparent weight, that when one of them dies, the other “will just have to be put on ice” because he genuinely doesn’t know how they’d go on. “I could feel the thing between them,” McCarthy says. “But it was so alien to me. I have not experienced that ever in my life. I envy it.”

Historically, McCarthy says, Lew and Bobby’s friendship might not have been so striking. “By the time John Wayne took over, men became lone wolves,” he says. “Carry your own water. Don’t fucking talk about it, solve it. That’s what a man is. To our detriment, I’d say. We’ve just gotten all kinked up and weird about it.”

One of the book’s more striking chapters finds McCarthy making repeated trips to the Baltimore apartment of Seve, his oldest friend, who’d been canceling visits and sounding increasingly unwell on the phone. What he finds is a man who can barely move from the sofa and an apartment buried under Amazon boxes. McCarthy spends the afternoon breaking down cardboard while Seve directs from the one cleared corner. It is not a Hollywood scene. There are no footballs being thrown.

On one stop, McCarthy drops in on Pulitzer Prize–winning author Lawrence Wright and his friend, the writer Stephen Harrigan, in Austin. Something Wright says sticks with him: “Friendship isn’t something intense. It’s normal.”

McCarthy drove 10,000 miles to land there.