Griffin Dunne’s memoir The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir is shaped by his privileged upbringing in Los Angeles, as his family mingled with celebrities like Sean Connery and Natalie Wood. His boundless appetite for life and quest for connection manifests in stories about his friendship with Carrie Fisher and a teenage marriage in Tijuana, Mexico. Storytelling runs in his family too: his uncle, writer John Gregory Dunne, married Joan Didion, and his father, Dominick Dunne, later became a renowned crime writer. But this memoir is rooted in tragedy. In 1982, the author’s sister Dominique was choked by her ex-boyfriend, and she never regained consciousness. The publicity surrounding her killer’s trial and sentence upended his family and, along with it, his sense of self. Dunne careens through the stages of grief, a raw nerve in search of meaning. Ultimately his story is a reminder that we only get so much time with the ones we love—so we have to make the most of it.
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