The Friday Afternoon Club

In the first few pages of The Friday Afternoon Club, the author drops the names of Jacqueline Bouvier, Admiral John Cain, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his future aunt Joan Didion, his uncle John Gregory Dunne, Stephen Sondheim, Clifford Odets, Bono, Paul Newman, James Dean, his bewitching babysitter Elizabeth Montgomery and his father Dominick Dunne. He also mentions that Sean Connery saved him from drowning at a pool party. Not for self-aggrandisement, more to give the reader a feeling of the milieu that he grew up in and setting the scene for what the book is going to explore.

The ‘family memoir’ promise of the subtitle is strictly adhered to; Griffin, the star of After Hours, is not the centre of this memoir. The sprawling Irish-American Dunne family hold the heart of this story.

Griffin grows up in serious bourgeois comfort. Dominick is a big-time producer of TV shows and eventually movies. The first third of this book details Dominick’s rise and fall. Producing a disastrous movie overseas that cost him his career, Dominick returned to Hollywood in ignominy and fled to a cabin in the woods to become a writer.

When Griffin’s sister Dominique is strangled by her abusive boyfriend, the family are appalled at how the murderer’s defence team tries to blame the victim for provoking the killer. Tina Brown, who Dominick had met at a party to celebrate when she took over Vanity Fair magazine, had promised him if he kept a diary she would find a way to publish it. This diary became a testimony to the horror of the legal system. It also made a literary star out of Dominick, who became famous for writing about high-society murder cases all the way through to O.J. Simpson.

This is one of the most fascinating and tragic family sagas you could ever hope to read.