Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club is in some ways an ode to the triumph of American adolescence, which his aunt, Joan Didion, described with some foreboding in her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. There, Didion lamented the collapse of a coherent (read: grown-up) narrative amid the divergent youth movements of the counterculture; for her nephew, who grew up in the era, the situation is more personal. His artful book, slyly written and vividly rendered, announces itself as a “Family Memoir,” and what a family it is: his father, Dominick Dunne, a television and film producer who became a bestselling novelist; his sister, Dominique Dunne, a promising actor murdered at 22; his uncle, John Gregory Dunne, a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter; and, of course, Didion herself. Dunne does an admirable job recalling each of the departed, and there is some voyeuristic thrill in watching the jealousy and substance-fueled feuds of all these literary egos.
I have to admit I came to Dunne’s memoir dreading some hagiography of Didion, who has been the subject of many such encomiums since her death in 2021. Dunne already made the case for her beatification in his 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that he goes out of his way to give his uncle due recognition as an important writer himself, separate from Didion’s achievements. For those who knew the couple, it was impossible to hold one in high esteem without similarly crediting the other. They each made sure of that. Meanwhile, Dunne’s father’s journey from stage manager to television producer to true-crime reporter and eventually acclaimed novelist is a comeback story drenched in, and fueled by, tragedy.
Still, The Friday Afternoon Club is at its energetic best when Dunne recounts his own California adolescence amid celebrity and debauchery. When, as a 13-year-old, he goes to his aunt and uncle’s house with plans to seduce Janis Joplin only to end up guiding Otto Preminger through a bad acid trip, we are in something like peak California cool and can thrill at living vicariously through the skillfully reconstructed scenes. There are dozens of such moments, among them young Dunne sleeping with Carrie Fisher or becoming so aroused while massaging Linda Fiorentino that he seeks relief via anonymous sex in the bathroom of the nightclub Area. And yet, for all this, it is Dunne’s earnest self-doubt and introspection that prevent the book from falling into kiss-and-tell territory.
Or rather, it does slip into that territory, but just enough to satisfy the more prurient reader. After all, a writer wants to earn out an advance.
That’s not to diminish the genuine achievement of The Friday Afternoon Club. The book transcends celebrity or even literary memoir to become a kind of bawdy bildungsroman—almost as if Evelyn Waugh had been sent down from Oxford not to West Hampstead but to Beverly Hills. When Dunne leaves the celebrities and literary lions behind and ventures out into late-1960s and early-1970s Los Angeles and New York in search of what can only be called teenage kicks, the book becomes less bold-faced and more fun.
In part because he’s Griffin Dunne, whose impish face we might best remember from An American Werewolf in London, it’s easy to picture him and his chum Charlie, both of them 14, cruising the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, encountering a stratum of Hollywood several rungs below that of his relations. “What Jane Goodall was to gorillas, I was to hookers,” Dunne writes, describing the sex workers who frequented Milton F. Kreis, the hotel’s all-night coffee shop. “When I grew up, I hoped to marry a hooker like Shirley MacLaine in Irma la Douce.” These women take to using Dunne to walk them past security so they can troll the hallways of the hotel. Eventually, he is dispatched to boarding schools in Massachusetts and Colorado, and the book evolves from Waugh into Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, only with football instead of rugby and with marijuana and LSD replacing sherry. (It is in Colorado that Dunne discovers his talent for acting.)
Meanwhile, on trips back home to Los Angeles, he continues his debauched journey, becoming best friends with Fisher, then known simply as Debbie Reynolds’s daughter. It’s a glorious time of life, full of sex and drugs, and when the adults are around, they’re Harrison Ford or Warren Beatty. Such experiences are only made possible because Dunne had “parents with more on their minds than to wonder how I spent my days and who were oblivious to the fact that my mode of transportation was to get in the cars of strangers who picked me up hitchhiking.”
We’re lucky they were so oblivious, because that allowed for the kind of experiences that elevate this book above the status of celebrity memoir.
That long, hot American summer, of course, represents a kind of blissful innocence that is shattered by the murder of Dunne’s younger sister, Dominique, strangled to death by a deranged ex-boyfriend. (The subsequent trial would launch their father’s literary career after Tina Brown asked him to cover it for Vanity Fair.) Strangely, she never comes across as a vivid character, though he writes of her affinity for stray dogs and cats and her quiet but steady talent as an actor.
But no matter how connected or famous, someone who dies at 22 is still more potential than realized promise. And one of the great tragedies of Dominique’s death is that she never became fully formed, despite her breakthrough role in Poltergeist, a success that Dunne, with typical and commendable candor, admits to feeling jealous over at the time. I understand his inability to fully color in his sister’s life. My own daughters are 22 and 25, and I can only guess at their great passions and fears and desires. Grown-ups, after all, can act and dress like the young, but the truth is we are only re-creating a feeling we once had. In The Friday Afternoon Club, Dunne has done a masterful job of doing exactly that.•
Karl Taro Greenfeld is a novelist, journalist and television writer whose books include Speed Tribes,Triburbia, Boy Alone and The Subprimes. He has been a writer and producer on Ray Donovan, Tokyo Vice, Monarch, and See. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
