Best Books of the Year 2024
Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Memoir (2024)
Book Blurb:
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.
My Review:
Has the drama and trauma experienced by Griffin Dunne in his life been fully exposed in his memoir?
I’m torn.
Is this memoir truly a tell all, name-dropping exposé of his life, or a bid to one up his dad? I’m not sure. Griffin details a childhood full of the growth of his father’s career that led to their Hollywood experience and the introduction to a myriad list of well-known celebrities. Most of the time it felt like he was actively grabbing the coattails of one or the other of his family or his latest squeeze using everyone as a stepping stone to something bigger and better.
He discusses his aunt, author Joan Didion, and his “soulmate” Carrie Fisher (I wondered if she knew she was his soulmate and, of course, is no longer around to dispute that. I read her memoir as well and just don’t remember mention of him). Carrie did an amazing job, not just with her writing style, wit, and often sarcastic delivery, but the overall story she had to tell.
Griffin exhibits a sense of humor, but not the delivery, and his focus is different, remembering anecdotes of the many celebrities who passed through his life. He decries his father using the violent death of his sister, Dominique, as a springboard for his newly discovered writing career, but then devotes a large portion of his own book to reviewing the sensational trial of the ex-boyfriend who murdered her and the accompanying appalling loss of justice.
Dunne writes of his sexual exploits, detailing a few, while exposing his newly clean and sober closeted father. The reason for the name of the book is touched upon only briefly well into the book and I’m not sure is relevant–to the reader anyway.
I both enjoyed and found parts of his novel disturbing and I don’t think you’ll find a lot here that would be a surprise. I downloaded a copy of this audiobook from my local well-stocked library. These are my honest thoughts.
Rosepoint Publishing: Four Stars 
Book Details:
Genre: Biographies of Authors, Author Biographies, Biographies of Celebrities & Entertainment Professionals
Publisher: Penguin Audio
ASIN: B0CQKJBPXQ
Listening Length: 12 hrs 19 mins
Narrator: Griffin Dunne
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Source: Local Library (Audiobook Selections)
Title Links:
The Friday Afternoon Club – Amazon-US
Amazon-UK
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
The Author: Griffin Dunne has been an actor, producer, and director since the late 1970s. Among his work, he produced and acted in After Hours; he directed Practical Magic and the documentary The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt, Joan Didion. Griffin and his dog, Mary, live in the East Village of Manhattan.
©2025 V Williams
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Rosepoint Publishing 
I’m very keen to read this. I’ve always been a fan of Dunne’s acting and what a family!
Thank you. Unfortunately, this is my first experience with him as a writer and can’t say I remember his acting career either. Stuff I didn’t see or watch?
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A couple of months back I read a long article about this family and Dominique’s death. I think they (the brother and father more specifically) truly struggled to find closure after Dominique died because justice was never realized in her case. They eventually had to let go and live with the end result of everything. I remember feeling a sense of sadness for them.
Indeed, the judge was a POS. He eventually had a strong look at with his renderings in that case. It was a horrible miscarriage of justice, I agree with that. I felt bad for them, could imagine some of their feeling, but more anger towards the judge and somewhat against the defense atty as well. He knew the guy was bad news. Getting him off so lightly gave him…what, a more powerful paycheck?
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