literary career subsequently expanded beyond straightforward travel journalism.
In 2017, McCarthy published the young-adult novel Just Fly Away. The book centers on a teenage girl whose understanding of her family changes when she learns that she has a half-brother. Its publication demonstrated that McCarthy wanted to experiment with fictional storytelling as well as memoir and travel journalism. The novel became another stage in an increasingly varied creative career. By this point, describing him only as an actor from Pretty in Pink captured just one part of his professional life. He
