If you lived in leafy Dublin 6 in the early 2000s or 2010s, there’s a good chance you’ll have bumped into Hollywood actor-turned-writer Andrew McCarthy.

Currently based in New York, he and his wife, the Clontarf-reared academic/screenwriter Dolores Rice, whom he calls “the best thing I ever did”, bought a house in Rathgar during the boom times to be close to her parents.

The couple have lived there at various spells in the last 20 or so years alongside their two children, Willow (15) and Rowan (7) and, occasionally, 19-year-old Sam, McCarthy’s son from a previous marriage.

“We’re back and forth a lot,” McCarthy explains on a Zoom call from his upstate New York lake house. “In some ways, whenever we go to Dublin, it’s more like I’m going to my in-laws, really. We go have tea at their house and there goes the whole day. I love going out to the country when I’m there.”

McCarthy even manages to enjoy Dublin’s pub life, despite being sober since 1992. “I mean, there’s clearly a lot of drinking and if you’re hanging around pubs, you’re not just hanging around drinkers,” he says.

“I go to pubs there because it’s the centre of social life in many ways. If you’re there for the fellowship, you know it’s not a problem drinking Ballygowan. Nobody there goes: ‘Why aren’t you drinking?’ And luckily, at this point, I’m in a sort of position of neutrality around it.”

In his memoir Brat: An ’80s Story — one of the more compelling and lyrical celebrity memoirs to drop for quite some time — McCarthy discusses his battles with alcoholism.

While filming 80s hits like Pretty in Pink, McCarthy was living in the fast lane; by the time he shot 1997’s Mannequin opposite Kim Cattrall, he was drinking to excess on a near-daily basis. While filming Less Than Zero (1987), McCarthy’s cocaine habit nearly gave him a heart attack.

He has come a long way since then: geographically, emotionally and psychologically. McCarthy has acted on and off down the years in low-key roles, though lives a world away from the dizzying heights of Hollywood fame and Brat Pack notoriety.

Several of those in the so-called Pack — Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy — have experienced wildly varying degrees of acting success, fame, infamy or addiction since their 80s heyday.

McCarthy stepped back and took a career pivot, becoming a travel writer and, later, a TV director, working on shows like The Blacklist and Orange is the New Black. He has had ambivalent feelings on the ‘Brat Pack’ label, most of which he worked through while writing Brat.

The phrase was coined in a New York magazine article in which McCarthy’s co-stars from St Elmo’s Fire were interviewed at the Hard Rock Café in Hollywood and portrayed, much as the name suggests, as entitled fame-chasers.

McCarthy, based in New York, was nowhere to be seen at that moment, but as happened for many others from that cohort of coming-of-age films, the label somehow stuck.

“I took issue with it for a long time, and found it a very pejorative, stigmatising thing,” McCarthy says. “I felt like I was just starting and, suddenly, was just branded and put in a box. And I didn’t have the wherewithal to manoeuvre my way out of that, so I recoiled from it.”

And now? “We were sort of perceived as the ultimate in-group, and if I had just accepted that aspect of it, it probably would have saved me a lot of grief.”

It took McCarthy years to realise what films like Pretty in Pink, St Elmo’s Fire and Weekend at Bernie’s meant to its audience.

“It’s not even the movies, really — it’s the memories of the movies because people look at those movies and they just go ‘oh man’… what they’re remembering is the big thing.

"They remember themselves at that moment when their lives are just beginning, and they’re blossoming into these blank canvases, waiting to be written on. It’s the most exciting moment in life.

“The Brat Pack have become a sort of avatar for this moment in their life. So that’s kind of a beautiful thing to evolve into.”

People have urged McCarthy to write a memoir on his time in 80s Hollywood many times over the years. “It’s sort of, ‘be careful if you write a memoir, because that sort of becomes the truth’,” he says.

He has strong thoughts on fame: “It’s not something that has intrinsic value of itself. It doesn’t exist, yet we describe it with this kind of import.

“I think fame changes you on a cellular level, but I’ve often said I wouldn’t wish fame on anyone under 30. It’s precarious ground to walk on… it’s not the best way to develop into the most rounded, well-adjusted person. Steve Martin once said: ‘I was too famous, now I’m famous just enough’. I kind of like that.”

On making the move into writing, he says: “You know, it never really occurred to me to do it. I didn’t have an intelligence. But when I was travelling a lot, doing long trips alone, I started writing down incidents that happened to me and the people I met.

"Then, one day, I was interested in doing something about it. I had a mentor at National Geographic Traveller magazine and he said: ‘Don’t be a travel writer, be a writer who writes about travel.’”

A Young Adult novel, Just Fly Away, was then published in 2017. “It was an adult novel for a long time, about a marriage and a guy who kept a child secret, and when I changed it to the perspective of the 15-year-old daughter who just found out she had this brother, it made complete sense to me.”

Would he ever collaborate on a writing project with Dolores, who has previously written scripts for Jim Sheridan’s Hell’s Kitchen company? “We talked about it, and I’m not as good a writer as her. I’m just not near as good as [collaborating] with others as she is.”

Brat: An ’80s Story is stuffed with Hollywood tales, and anecdotes involving Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, and a near-encounter with the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off project, are worth the admission price alone.

The book also afforded McCarthy a chance to process other complex parts of his life. There was a fractious relationship with his father. After he voiced his disapproval of McCarthy’s decision to train as an actor at NYU, his father would later cadge money from him and then turn up in front of his friends, theatrically stuffing the cash in his pockets.

“When I wrote the first draft of the book, there was very little of my father, and then I realised if you’re going to write this kind of thing, you can’t be judiciously withholding stuff, because what’s the point of anyone investing time in reading it?” he admits.

Now 58, things have come full circle a bit as his son Sam is making his own way in the world of acting. All the while McCarthy still gets recognised a lot.

Referring to a moment in a Wyoming diner a decade ago, he says: “The waitress comes up and is like: ‘You’re that guy. Pretty in Pink and that dead-guy movie.’ I’d always protected my kids from that kind of thing and tried to keep them isolated from that stuff. When the woman left, I turned to Sam and said: ‘Was that OK for you?’ And he said: ‘Dad, I’m so proud.’ And in that instant, I realised I’d done everything wrong.”

Brat: An ’80s Story by Andrew McCarthy is out now via Grand Central Publishing.