Griffin Dunne's memoir of privilege, misadventures, and the murder of his sister

Life is what you make it, especially when times are tough.

For example: It's after midnight and you've come to SoHo to see a woman you met at a restaurant, but she's not all she seemed and you can't pay the subway home because your money flew out of the taxi window in the way downtown, so you wander around but end up being mistaken for a thief and then the woman at the restaurant overdoses and before you know it, you're being chased by a mob of punks led by a vigilante who drives a Mister Softee truck. But you still get to work on time.

Sure, this is the story of Martin Scorsese's dark and eccentric classic “After Hours,” but by his own account, it could easily be a night in the life of the film's lead actor, Griffin Dunne. In his new memoir, “The Friday Afternoon Club,” Dunne, who would be nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance, remembers reading the script for the first time.

“On the tenth page, the terrible things that happened to the hero of the story made me so anxious that I couldn't read sitting down,” he writes. “I was perfect for the role. The misadventures of Paul Hackett, the main character, could only have happened to me.”

Another title of “The Friday Afternoon Club” could have been “The Misadventures of Griffin Dunne.” Throughout the book, which focuses primarily on the first 35 years of his life, he is “whipped and fondled” (at a boarding school), humiliated (frequently), nearly killed in a street fight, fired, arrested, labeled as “second-rate Dudley Moore” by Pauline Kael and sexually abused by a skilled Tennessee Williams.

Dunne largely bears these slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, aware, perhaps, that by retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke. He derives great benefit from his own bad luck.

There is also good luck. Dunne grew up privileged in the free Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s, the oldest of three brothers.

His parents, Lenny and Dominick Dunne, and his uncles, the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, enjoyed a starry social life. Party guests included Truman Capote, Natalie Wood and Tuesday Weld. Sean Connery saved him from drowning. Elizabeth Montgomery, later Samantha in “Bewitched,” took care of him.

Later, her best friend and roommate in New York was Carrie Fisher (Debbie Reynolds paid the rent). In one episode, Fisher manages to lose her virginity to our hero, who turns out to be something like Don Juan. “Falling in love with girls was what I did for a living, for free,” she writes.

But despite all that, “The Friday Afternoon Club” is haunted at its core by a terrible family tragedy.

The worst night of the Dunnes' lives occurs twice in the book. In a brief prologue, we read about the night in late 1982 when a homicide detective knocked on the door of Lenny Dunne's Los Angeles home with the news that his daughter, Dominique, had been strangled and was in intensive care. Griffin, then 27, could still taste cocaine from the night before in his throat when his father called him to tell him.

This night looms over hundreds of pages of family history and childhood memories before Dunne returns to the story. The death of Dominique, a rising star thanks to her role in that year's hit film “Poltergeist,” and the trial of her ex-boyfriend John Sweeney are the subject of the book's devastating final act.

What makes these unimaginable events so readable and allows Dunne to find a kind of grace even in the midst of tragedy is his unwavering dark humor and his unwavering nose for a good story.

Perhaps the ability to extract the worst experiences to obtain a good copy was inherited. After all, Dominick Dunne's late success as a journalist began with the hit story of him, at the vanity fair, of the Sweeney trial. Initially, Griffin was ambivalent towards the piece, doubting his father's motives and feeling that the family's pain was not visible to the public, but admits that it would later become “a bible that he would share with anyone he thought would could become part of my life.” .”

In fact, it is possible that Griffin's account of those terrible days was shaped in part by Dominick's; Numerous details recall the Vanity Fair essay, and father and son seem to share a cautious appreciation of the black comedy of fate. Both find dark humor, for example, in the disaster of Dominique's funeral, ruined by a pickled monsignor who coincided with a wedding.

“As the driver opened the door for us to get out,” Dominick writes, “a gust of hot wind blew multicolored wedding confetti into the car.” Griffin continues: “While Dominique was being lowered to the ground, a tour bus let tourists out in front of Marilyn Monroe's columbarium.”

One could also detect Aunt Joan's influence, especially in Dunne's level-headedness and her keen eye for the material, however painful.

In “The Center Will Not Hold,” the invaluable Netflix documentary she made about Didion in 2017, she asks what it was like to watch a 5-year-old girl get high on LSD, an incident she wrote about in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” After a pause, Didion says, “Let me tell you, it was gold.” Dunne is also a seeker of incandescent details.

Ultimately, Dunne shows the power of writing and temperament to transform the central tragedy of his life into much more than a simple story of suffering.

As with his character in “After Hours,” there are certainly moments where he could have thrown his arms up and shouted “What do you want from me?” Instead, he finds comfort in the memory of Dominique long after she is gone.

He becomes a kind of guardian angel; he feels his presence in the peaceful final pages of the book, as he happily holds his first-born daughter. Even the title of her memoir is Dominique's: the Friday Afternoon Club is a short-lived but fondly remembered weekly gathering with her fellow performers.

It's the kind of detail that, in retrospect, gives life the richness that makes it worth enduring and celebrating, despite everything.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, movies, and music.