Griffin Dunne's Friday Afternoon Club critiques Hollywood tales | Autobiography and memoir

Earc in this deft and multi-faceted family memoir, Griffin Dunne admits that he is known for telling funny stories. His father was the journalist and author Dominick Dunne, and his uncles and aunts Joan Didion and John Dunne. While most children could make up a story about a trip or an imaginary pet, for example, the Dunnes family was privileged enough to be able to make up a casual story. Meet Jackie and John Kennedy at church and make it believable. I was raised on stories told by people who loved to tell stories, he writes. And as he quickly learns not to trust anything he's heard, especially from his father, the lies unravel to reveal a generous, star-studded book that delves into emotional waters deeper than your standard chronicle of well-connected Hollywood life.

Dunne is just the latest in a long line of storytellers and characters. There was the great-great-uncle who died in flagrante delicto with his mistress on a yacht, his body was dressed in pajamas and taken back to his hotel room on dry land, where his wife learned that He had died in his sleep. There was the great-great aunt who married her lover just in time for them to attend her previous husband's funeral as a married couple. But they're just a warm-up for his immediate family: his father Dominick, his mother Ellen, or Lenny, and his siblings Alex and Dominique. The Friday Afternoon Club owes its name to the informal stakeholder meetings that Dominique organized every week. After starring in Poltergeist, her career was on the rise when she was killed by an abusive ex-boyfriend at the age of 22. His death means that the book radically changes register halfway through.

Before Dominique's death, we have a stylish tale of an eccentric family in the heart of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, with stars visiting the Dunness House in Los Angeles. Dominick loved throwing fabulous parties where studio heads and movie stars mingled around the couches. For the couple's 10th wedding anniversary, he threw a black-and-white-themed ball attended by Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, John Huston and Dennis Hopper. It would also be the couple's final anniversary, as Lenny filed for divorce from her husband, who later came out as gay, less than a year later.

As a cinematic memoir, it is vivid and elegant. Dunnes' years of sex and drugs give him a Bret Easton Ellis impression, without quite the same level of sass, and there's a lot of name-calling, though most are well-deserved. He attends a party thrown by his uncle and aunt on the promise that Janis Joplin will be there, only to find himself cornered by director Otto Preminger, who is having a bad acid trip. He idolizes the carpenter who built the deck of the Dunne-Didion house, a carpenter named Harrison Ford. Tennessee Williams gropes him at a party. As a teenager he befriended a charming girl called Carrie Fisher, and the story of their close lifelong friendship gives a clear insight into Fisher's mind and character.

In his work as a producer, actor and director, Dunne directed Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock in PracticalMagic and in 2017 released The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary about his aunt Joan, although the book ended well before the two are clearly intrigued by fame. and its effects, although, fascinatingly, it has a strong line of self-sabotage. Every time fame begins to surround him, he recoils, as if appalled by the offer. In a truly unexpected twist, his career as a leading man is derailed when he signs up for a disastrous film about a man who talks to his penis. Jack Nicholson wisely refuses to be the voice of the penis.

In 1982, when Dunne was 27 and trying to make a living as a stage actor in New York, his father called him to tell him that Dominique had been strangled by her ex-boyfriend and that she was on life support in Los Angeles. She died a few days later. The Friday Afternoon Club begins with this nightmarish memory, then returns to it, dividing the book into a heartbreaking before and after. The second part of the story recounts the death of her sister and the gruesome criminal trial of her attacker, John Sweeney. We move from Less Than Zero territory to something more reminiscent of Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts, another indelible personal account of a murder trial involving a family member. Dunne is forensic in his reporting on what went so wrong. Information about Sweeney's history of violence toward an ex-girlfriend was not provided to the jury. The judge's animosity towards the family appeared blatant. Even today, 40 years later, the extent to which justice has crumbled remains shocking. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and released after less than four years behind bars.

Dunne continues to work as an actor while the trial unfolds, managing to divide his life into two distinct and separate dramas, but on set, through a series of typically bizarre coincidences, he is offered the services of a murderer. pawns who could murder Sweeney in prison. Things go badly and he is briefly tempted by the idea. For years after this, his rage towards his sister's killer burned intensely as he stalked Sweeney from town to town, warning all the new girlfriends of what he had done and what he might be able to do it again. Eventually, to his surprise, the anger simply begins to subside. I choose not to forgive or forget, he writes, only accepting that hatred no longer has such a hold on him.

In classic Dunne family style, Sweeney's trial made his father known as a journalist: Tina Brown asked him to write some for Vanity Fair, and the piece had a huge impact. Everything is copy, as Nora Ephron said, but throughout the book Dunne explores the question of what is and is not legitimate material. Her father would talk about his daughter's death on chat shows for the rest of his life. He seemed quite ready and willing to use Dominique's trial as a springboard for his own midlife metamorphosis, Dunne writes, although he notes that he is not sure whether the father noticed the ambivalence of his son. After an anecdote about Dunne's teenage masturbation ends up in one of his Uncle John's novels, he remembers his Aunt Joans' famous aphorism: Writers always betray someone.

Although we witness Dunne's transformation from a confessed liar to a painfully frank memoirist, we get no sense that he's selling out his family here. The story is merciless but also affectionate, by turns flattering and austere, depending on the scene. What emerges is a compelling novel and life story and a self-deprecating guide to Dunness's many ups and downs. It’s a loving but captivating family portrait.

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