A memoir and coming-of-age story chronicling the successes and disappointments, wit and wildness of the actor, producer, and director Griffin Dunne and his multigenerational family of larger-than-life characters, including his uncle and aunt, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion.
As a movie-business memoir, it is brisk and classy. Dunne’s sex and drugs years give it a Bret Easton Ellis feel, without quite the same level of brashness, and there is plenty of name-dropping, though most of it is well earned ... The second part of the story recounts his sister’s death and the appalling criminal trial of her attacker, John Sweeney. We move from Less Than Zero territory into something more reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts, another indelible personal account of a murder trial involving a family member ... Though we witness Dunne morphing from self-confessed fibber into painfully candid memoirist, there is no sense that he is selling his family out here. His story is unsparing but also affectionate, alternately flattering and stark, depending on the scene. What emerges is a novelistic and compelling account of a life, and a self-deprecating guide to the Dunnes’s many highs and lows. It is a fond yet riveting family portrait.
Dunne largely bears...slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, conscious, perhaps, that in retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke. He gets terrific mileage from his own bad luck ... What makes these unimaginable events so readable, and allows Dunne to find a kind of grace even amid tragedy, are his unshakable black humor and unfailing nose for a good story.
So honest and funny and smart ... Most will find it both bracing and incredibly human. I know that I did. What a guy, I kept thinking, as I wolfed his book down.
