The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

The day after the disastrous funeral at Our Lady of the Cadillacs, Mom received a phone call from a woman who opened with the line “Mrs. Dunne, I’m afraid you are now a member of a club that no one wants to belong to.” On the other end was Doris Tate, mother of Sharon Tate, calling on behalf of a group called Parents of Murdered Children. Her daughter was eight months pregnant when stabbed to death by Charles Manson’s cult members, and she was calling to invite my mother to a meeting of her support group being held that night. Mom asked us if we would like to go, and Dad said he “wasn’t ready,” followed by a “no fucking way” from Alex, so I took her to the meeting at a church in Brentwood. I wheeled my mother into a space a parent had made for her in an already formed circle of other parents. Someone brought me a chair to sit next to her, but I felt I didn’t belong and was about to leave, when Mom mouthed, “Please stay.”