The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

Within the decade, Joan would be famous for taking positions contrary to popular opinion, accepting the vitriol that followed, and not straying from an inner strength she called “character.”

And he was right about Truman Capote bringing the fun to the dance floor. He cha-cha’d and caramba’d the night away, having so much fun that he decided to give his own Black and White Ball the next year. Nick Dunne was not on the guest list.

If you grow up around novelists, someday you will be collateral damage for a good story. My aunt Joan had an aphorism that I was to learn the hard way: “A writer is always selling somebody out.” —

“Well, what did you think when you opened my letters, or stopped opening them? Did you find it at all disturbing?” Mom thought about it for a while, ignoring the edge in my voice, and replied, “I just thought you didn’t have much to say.”

Her detachment from my feelings was an early symptom of MS, one that over the coming years would extend to her friends, making communication so impossible they stopped coming by. But at that moment, she at least still had a sense of humor, and even though I was a little hurt, I laughed at her droll comment and never mentioned my letters again.

Years later, I came across a quote of Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille that is still tacked on the corkboard in my office. I read it for inspiration and self-assurance, and as penance should I miss another opportunity to learn from someone: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.

The celebrities in our living room were my parents’ friends, who lived on a planet I wanted to move far away from, to find a world of my own. And now, with Carrie, I found myself off course, once more the little boy in a matching bathrobe working my way through a room of celebrities it was not my time to meet. This was not my planet, and I knew I would have to move on.

There is a nonfiction book called The Gift of Fear, written by a security specialist named Gavin de Becker, who also happens to be one of my oldest friends. The thesis of his book is that we are all capable of predicting an act of violence or a traumatic event in our future that can be avoided if we listen to the first impression of our instincts.

That Sweeney would one day commit an act of violence that would traumatize my family for the rest of our lives did not occur to me, but my uneasiness when we met was a “gift” I declined to accept. What I listened to was my sister’s boyfriend address me with exaggerated respect, but what he was really saying to me that evening was he was just like the Sheik, a character capable of violence and obsessively in love with a girl he did not believe he could keep.