The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

I was twenty-seven years old but never felt more like a lost little boy.

“That is the woman you are going to marry.”

“We wish Lenny, Nick, and Griffin all the luck in the world as they begin their bright future.” As it turned out, we were going to need it.

Far from thinking this morbid bit of history was a perverse detail to tell a child, I found it fascinating, like a surprising twist in an otherwise mundane story.

I would become a person who played fictional characters on the stage or screen in other people’s stories, raised by a family who wrote books and produced movies about people with stories to tell.

Dominique and I were in awe of his intelligence and sensitivity, but secretly I thought feeling that much must be exhausting.

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.”

describing the plot of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the best book she’d ever read since her last favorite book from the week before.

“Age does not protect you from love. But love protects you from age.”

Before I failed Spanish, I remember the teacher describing the eve of fluency as when one night you dream in the language and suddenly can speak it the next morning. That is what it felt like when Carrie and I realized we were best friends.

“You might want to fuck up your life, but you will not fuck up Othello!”

It was as if life delivered her a great blast of good fortune right up to the moment when it would all be ripped away.

“Life is for the living,” June said stoically. “And ‘death is for the dead.’ Langston Hughes. I love that poem,” I said, impressed that a Rockette was so well read. “What poem? I just made that shit up.”

We were actors who loved the history of movies, but didn’t pretend we knew how to make them, which endeared us to the crew, who were happy to support us and share their years of knowledge.

My personal character was still undercooked, and my ego wasn’t strong enough to handle the scrutiny of fame,

“Are you crazy?” “Well, yes, I think we all are.”

But whoever I’d be in the days ahead would never be the person I was.

I raced to my IBM Selectric but had to smoke three cigarettes in rapid succession before my hands stopped trembling enough to hit the keys.

With stardom in my sights, I worked like a mad scientist concocting formulas for how to best fuck it up.

Carey not only was beautiful on the outside, but inside possessed a DNA I found wildly attractive. She was raised in Colorado by a family in which not one member was a drunk, killed themselves, had mental illness, or got murdered.

She lay content in my arms, as if she’d finally arrived at the place she was meant to be.

“You have a book inside you, and when you write it, I want first look,”