The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir (Unabridged)
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- 18,99 €
Publisher Description
The instant New York Times bestseller!
“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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Griffin Dunne grew up in a family of storytellers. His father, Dominick, was a TV executive who became one of the first superstar true-crime writers, and his beloved uncle, John, was a screenwriter and novelist married to the iconic writer Joan Didion. Even when he was an adult, Dunne’s roommate and BFF was actress-turned-novelist Carrie Fisher. All that to say, Dunne’s own successes as an actor aren’t the focus in this arresting memoir. Full of dishy Hollywood gossip, hilariously embarrassing family stories, and genuine heartbreak, this is truly the story of Dunne’s family. In particular, Griffin’s younger sister, Dominique, murdered in 1982 by her ex-boyfriend just as her own acting career was taking off, dominates the book’s second half, just as his parents’ tempestuous marriage does the first. Dunne handles his own narration, and his voice adds intimacy to what are already deeply personal stories. Bittersweet and powerful, The Friday Afternoon Club is one of the best celebrity memoirs we’ve listened to in ages.
