Should you join Griffin Dunne's The Friday Afternoon Club?
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
The 1982 murder of Griffin Dunne's sister, Dominique; the second career Dunne's father, Dominick, then made reporting on high-profile trials for Vanity Fair.
The story
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir isn't really a crimoir, or it isn't only a crimoir, so if you come to Griffin Dunne's new book wanting only his experience of his sister's murder – or of his father's publishing ascent in its wake – then the book is maybe not for you. (Not least because, if that's your area of interest, you probably read much of the pertinent material when VF excerpted it a few months ago.)
to read the rest, click here, or get a paid sub to Best Evidence and get all content straight to your inbox in its entirety
If you come to it for set goss from Dunne's films like Johnny Dangerously and After Hours, or stories about Dunne's childhood in Hollywood, running with Jack Palance's son as a kid, Dunne's best-friendship with Carrie Fisher, wellll, you'll get some of that. Here again, though, a bunch of the juiciest tidbits have been out there for a while now, and a handful of bracing stories get blind-itemed. If you want a 20th-century-Hollywood slam book, Friday Afternoon Club isn't really for you, either.
And if you come to it for further insight into the rift between Dunne's father and his uncle, John Gregory Dunne, or how it might have felt for Dunne fils caught in the middle, Friday Afternoon Club doesn't really go there. …Not that that was terribly complicated, let's face it: most families have cool kids and try-hards; John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion were the former, Dominick the latter; Griffin loved his father but found him damply embarrassing at the same time.
But the reader kind of has to infer that, from other biographies about the family, from Griffin Dunne's making a documentary about Didion after his father's death. If you want Dunne to hang a light on that family-of-origin mess, this isn't the book for you.
The book is maybe not "for" anyone except Griffin Dunne, now that I think about it?
Which is fine, by the way! And it's not like I had a bad time reading it; I had a fine time! The timelines feel a little squishy and confusing, and I could have done with about 75 percent fewer "funny" stories from his adolescence that read at best as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but the writing is pretty good overall, natural and straightforward. Dunne writes what he remembers best, and what he wants to remember most; the result has a montaged quality, and that's not for everyone, but I respect that none of it feels obligatory.
But maybe because of its collage-y nature, Friday Afternoon Club feels a bit distant, a bit removed. It's not lacking in insight, it's not failing to process trauma, it's not unwilling to engage, but it does seem like Dunne doesn't want things to get too messy, or like a wry arm's length is where he keeps everything. Like I said, that's fine, and that approach does tell the reader something about how the grieving of a violent death is incorporated into the lives that come after. Still, the last scene in the book – set, you might say, near a thinning of the veil – has such relatable and direct emotion that, for me, it's where Friday Afternoon Club should have started, not ended, with that first clear sighting of Dunne and his heart.
That's me, though. Friday Afternoon Club is a good, quick read; it's perhaps not the book I had in mind, but I think it's the one Dunne had in mind, and there's something to be said for that.