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.
At its energetic best when Dunne recounts his own California adolescence amid celebrity and debauchery ... It is Dunne’s earnest self-doubt and introspection that prevent the book from falling into kiss-and-tell territory. Or rather, it does slip into that territory, but just enough to satisfy the more prurient reader ... The book transcends celebrity or even literary memoir to become a kind of bawdy bildungsroman.
Much of The Friday Afternoon Club is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born ... But there are pockets of real depth, too.
Here he uses his authorial gifts — a filmmaker’s eye, photographic memory and way with a quip — to great effect, exploring how the seemingly charmed lives of the Dunnes unraveled ... Griffin skillfully deploys humor to soften life’s blows.
Very funny ... It would be easy to dismiss a memoir by someone like Griffin who had every break in life, but this one is a gem written with sharp humor the perspective of someone who’s seen it all and knows it.
With a breezy style, Dunne chronicles how his family got through good times and bad — despite interfamilial spats — by coming together as a family when it counted.
Though subtitled A Family Memoir, this book is really about Mr. Dunne and his father. Irish touchstones, such as wit, guilt and silence, are all here, spangled with late-20th-century Hollywood stardust ... While Griffin Dunne wrote this heartbreaking and wry memoir, it is unmistakably a Dominick Dunne production.
Griffin spares no emotions in bringing readers the lion’s share of his life story ... Griffin possesses a self-deprecating manner in relating stories from both his youth and his adulthood.
Delightfully gossipy ... All this is relayed with great candour and precision by Dunne. It is no small thing to write a bereavement memoir with the shadow of Joan Didion over your shoulder, but Dunne does not suffer for the comparison. He writes beautifully.
Dunne’s storytelling is buoyant, his prose crisp; he’s most definitely a writer, too. This clear-eyed, heartfelt memoir ends with the birth of Dunne’s daughter in 1990; readers will hope for future books.
Dunne’s writing is vivid, openhearted, and full of a rich irony that inflects even the most emotional scenes ... The result is a raucously entertaining homage to an unforgettable dynasty.
