The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

That made perfect sense to me and was the first time I considered that failure could also be looked upon as success, an insight I would draw on for encouragement when faced with future disappointments.

If hero worship were a disease, my case would have been terminal.

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.”

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.

It was an essay about his process of writing, how a book can sometimes be born of a sentence that comes to mind and then sticks around.