The instant New York Times bestseller • Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME NPR People
Town & Country and Air Mail “Warm and perceptive.” — New York Times “Griffin Dunne knows
how to tell a story." — Washington Post "Dunne is a prospector for the incandescent detail.”
— Los Angeles Times “What a remarkable and moving story filled with twists and turns the
most famous of faces and a complex family revealed with loving candor. I was blown away by
Griffin Dunne’s life and his ability to capture so much of it in these beautifully written
pages.” —Anderson Cooper 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.
