The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

“Dad told us on the way home to pretend we did to get back at you for refusing to go to church. I remember he was really pissed.” So, all that time, I was telling a lie based on a lie. This should have come as no surprise, as I had been brought up on stories told by people who loved to tell stories. 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. My father’s fake heart attacks were no more real than his glass eye or my family sitting behind Jack and Jackie at Our Lady of the Cadillacs. They were stories, not lies, and encouraged to be repeated. But prolonging the whopper about my meeting the Kennedys was a bridge too far, even for me. That day in the coffee shop, I parted with that synthetic memory like passing an old lover on the street without saying hello, and never told that story again.