The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne Narrated by Griffin Dunne

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Griffin Dunne's long-awaited memoir is a stunning portrait of the 70s and 80s, and the stubborn persistence of life through tragedy. A hit for anyone who loves the verve of Patti Smith.

The instant New York Times bestseller!

“Warm and perceptive.” -New York Times

“Griffin Dunne knows how to tell a story." -Washington Post

"Dunne is a prospector for the incandescent detail.” -Los Angeles Times

“What a remarkable and moving story filled with twists and turns, the most famous of faces, and a complex family revealed with loving candor. I was blown away by Griffin Dunne's life and his ability to capture so much of it in these beautifully written pages.” -Anderson Cooper

Griffin Dunne's memoir of growing up among larger-than-life characters in Hollywood and Manhattan finds wicked humor and glimmers of light in even the most painful of circumstances

At eight, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne's legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At sixteen, he got kicked out of boarding school, ending his institutional education for good. In his early twenties, he shared an apartment in Manhattan's Hotel Des Artistes with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor working as a popcorn concessionaire at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the midst of it all, Griffin's twenty-two-year-old sister, Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s. The outcome was a travesty of justice that marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne's career as a crime reporter for Vanity Fair and a victims' rights activist.

And yet, for all its boldface cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no mere celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny, and moving characters-its author most of all.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/08/2024

After Hours actor Griffin recounts in his bittersweet debut how movies, madness, and murder have touched his celebrated American family. Dunne presents his recollections as a colorful ensemble piece starring his accomplished relatives, including his father, Dominick, who torpedoed his career as a Hollywood producer by insulting a powerful agent, then became a famous novelist; his mother, Ellen, who carried on several affairs; his brother, Alex, a brilliant writer; his sister, Dominique, an actor who costarred in Poltergeist; and his uncle and aunt by marriage, authors John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. The narrative is a swirl of parties, crude jokes, and sharply etched celebrity cameos, including a pre-fame, pot-smoking Harrison Ford, still working as a carpenter (“His stuff was so strong that after one toke I couldn’t tell the difference between a saw and a tape measure”), and a magnificently bratty Carrie Fisher. But there are darker currents, too: Dominick’s closeted homosexuality; Ellen’s diagnosis of multiple sclerosis; Alex’s intermittent psychosis. Anchoring the book is an account of 22-year-old Dominique’s death by strangulation, and her ex-boyfriend John Sweeney’s subsequent conviction on a relatively minor manslaughter charge. Dunne’s writing is vivid, openhearted, and full of a rich irony that inflects even the most emotional scenes, as when he recalls an extra on the set of the gangster spoof Johnny Dangerously offering to have his mob associates kill Sweeney. The result is a raucously entertaining homage to an unforgettable dynasty. Agents: David Kuhn and Nate Muscato, Aevitas Creative Management. (June)

From the Publisher

Warm and perceptive . . . This book [has] many well-wrapped little gifts . . . [and] pockets of real depth." —The New York Times

“What makes these unimaginable events so readable, and allows Dunne to find a kind of grace even amid tragedy, are his unshakable black humor and unfailing nose for a good story . . . One might also detect the influence of Aunt Joan . . . Dunne, too, is a prospector for the incandescent detail.” —Los Angeles Times

“Griffin Dunne knows how to tell a story . . . Here he uses his authorial gifts—a filmmaker’s eye, photographic memory and way with a quip—to great effect, exploring how the seemingly charmed lives of the Dunnes unraveled.” —Washington Post

“Deft and multifaceted . . . A novelistic and compelling account of a life, and a self-deprecating guide to the Dunnes’s many highs and lows. It is a fond yet riveting family portrait.” —The Guardian

“A disturbing and hilarious account of his upbringing in a storied Hollywood dynasty.” —The Hollywood Reporter

“In this funny, revealing, and fascinating memoir, [Dunne] makes a strong case for himself as his storied family's latest brilliant writer . . . Despite the charm of his relationship with Carrie Fisher or making movies with Scorsese, the heart of Dunne's story is his family, including his late sister Dominique, whose murder (and the subsequent trial for it) is explored with tenderness and heart.” —Town and Country, Best Books of Summer 2024

“Full of wonderful tales. . . of light, life, and colour.” —The Guardian

“Dunne’s writing is vivid, openhearted, and full of a rich irony that inflects even the most emotional scenes . . . The result is a raucously entertaining homage to an unforgettable dynasty.” —Publishers Weekly

“Captivating . . . beyond entertaining, honest in confronting heartbreaks and jealousies, often genuinely funny, and somehow understated . . . Dunne's storytelling is buoyant, his prose crisp; he's most definitely a writer . . . Clear-eyed, heartfelt . . . Readers will hope for future books.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Searing and powerful . . . compelling in its honesty.” —Library Journal

“What a remarkable and moving story filled with twists and turns, the most famous of faces, and a complex family revealed with loving candor. I was blown away by Griffin Dunne’s life and his ability to capture so much of it in these beautifully written pages.” —Anderson Cooper

“Griffin Dunne has given us a family history that is both humorous and heartbreaking. The Friday Afternoon Club is infused with the vitality that confidence in one's perceptions can bring and the ambiguity that accompanies the expense and strain of fame. Confessions of this order are works of art.” —Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum
 
“Griffin Dunne has been entertaining people—both on-screen and off—all his life. And though you probably know him best as a gifted actor, make no mistake—Dunne is a real writer. The Friday Afternoon Club is a riveting and rollicking portrait of Dunne’s unconventional family as well as a deeply considered reckoning with the tragedy that exploded within it. He is honest about himself, generous with others, and insightful about every glittering and dark aspect of his richly lived years. He is also—like the best entertainers—ridiculously funny. This is just a wonderful memoir. Period.” —Alexandra Styron, author of Reading My Father
 
“The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne’s singular memoir, is joyful, tragic, and resilient with a masterful, roving tone as varied as the actor-director-producer-author’s restless career. A self-described voracious reader and autodidact, Griffin renders the almost unbelievably American picaresque of his own and his family’s beginnings with a comic’s touch, and then has the spiritual maturity and writerly chops to handle both the looming tabloid heartbreak and its very personal, almost unbearable aftermath with unflinching honesty. Here is a talented man—flawed, injured, incomplete—a questing, charming, smart man taking on life (and death) day by day. His refusal of  ‘closure,’ the original Hollywood ending, is courageous and exemplary, and, like his father, and his aunt and uncle, and a host of unrecorded Irish American spinners of bittersweet tales in his colorful ancestry, Griffin takes his rightful place in a family and tradition of real writers.” —David Duchovny

“Despite the glamorous backdrops in California and New York, the author portrays a family whose core human experiences make them universally relatable . . . A poignant love letter and evidence that through it all, genuine love is the backbone that keeps a family strong.” —Kirkus (starred review)

Library Journal

04/01/2024

Successful actor/director/producer Dunne is the oldest son of journalist and victim rights' activist Dominick Dunne (1925–2009) and the nephew of novelist/essayist Joan Didion (1934–2021). In this searing and powerful memoir, readers learn about the author's troubled childhood and adolescence. After dire experiences at two boarding schools, he headed for New York with dreams of becoming a successful actor. While he looked for work, his friend and roommate Carrie Fisher filmed Star Wars. His sister, Dominique, created the titular Friday Afternoon Club when she became an actor; in addition to Griffin, she would invite her friends to the club, including a young George Clooney. Griffin Dunne got a foothold in film by producing several movies and eventually starred in An American Werewolf in London and After Hours, which he also coproduced. Everything changed in 1982, when Dominique, age 22 at the time, was murdered. The court convicted her ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, on a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter. The tragedy changed the family and the course of Dominick Dunne's career, inspiring him to become a crime reporter. VERDICT Raw and painful to read at times but compelling in its honesty, this memoir about the Dunnes will appeal to movie and true-crime fans.—Penelope J.M. Klein

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160446806
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	200,172

Read an Excerpt

The morning I was born, Dad was a wreck. Having gotten Mom safely to Doctors Hospital, he was told that she required an emergency C-section, and to sit in the waiting room until he was called. Five hours later, he’d gone through a pack of Luckies, and after making a nuisance of himself to every nurse who passed, he went to buy more smokes at a deli across the street.

Walking back to the lobby, he saw the surgeon who was to perform the C-section about to step into a cab. He ran to him and practically grabbed the doctor by the lapels.
“What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” “My wife! Is she all right?”
“Which one is your wife?” “Lenny Dunne, for God’s sake!”
“Oh, Mr. Dunne, my apologies, didn’t anyone tell you?” “Tell me what?”
“We did the C-section hours ago. She’s fine. Baby’s fine. Someone should have told you, but it’s been a crazy day. I’ve done three since.”

More relieved than pissed, Dad let the man get in his taxi. Before it pulled away from the curb, the doctor yelled out the window, “Oh, and don’t worry about the foot!”
On the long walk back to the maternity ward, Dad pictured me growing up in a wheelchair or with a prosthetic leg, but while my right foot did curl inward when I was a newborn, it turned itself out by the time I could walk.

From the moment I was born, my father told me I was always trying to get somewhere else. My first word was taxi. I had a toy suitcase that I’d carry around the living room and raise my hand to hail a cab, yelling, “Taxi, taxi,” as if late for an important meeting. Elizabeth Montgomery, who later played Samantha in Be- witched, was my first babysitter. She was a struggling actress with a small part in Late Love when she met my mother, and though Elizabeth was her employee, my mother and she became close friends. Elizabeth once told her, while changing my dia- pers, that I had a bigger dick than her husband. That marriage was, needless to say, short-lived.

There is a kinescope from an early episode of the Today show in which Arlene Francis, also from the cast of Late Love, interviews my mother, billed as the “typical New York house- wife,” while a camera follows her on a routine day. (The daugh- ter of a rancher who went to Miss Porter’s was hardly a relatable housewife, but somehow Dad got her the gig through his con- nections at NBC.) There wasn’t much content in the early days of morning talk shows, so this segment is a mundane, fifteen- minute blow-by-blow of the life of a young family. It begins with Dad heading to work like a character out of a John Cheever story, while Mom does household chores, runs errands, and takes me to Central Park to feed the ducks. At one point in the clip, she enters a shoe store on Lexington Avenue and leaves me in my pram on the sidewalk, as if we lived in Grover’s Corners.

When she tries to lay me down in my crib at the end of the day, I nuzzle into her neck, not wanting her to leave. Anyone tuning in that morning would have seen a little boy who loved his mother more than anything in the world. When the camera cuts back to Mom in the studio, having just watched the segment she narrated, she looks lost in the moment, as if still savoring my affection. Arlene Francis ends the interview by saying to her viewers, “We wish Lenny, Nick, and Griffin all the luck in the world as they begin their bright future.”
As it turned out, we were going to need it.

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