The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

I opened the issue of Esquire to John’s piece and dived in. 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. In this case the sentence was “When the trial began, we left the country.” He went on to say that five months after he thought of that sentence, his niece had been murdered. Then, as an afterthought he wrote, “I do not understand people who attend the trials of those accused of murdering their loved ones. You see them on the local newscasts…I watch them kiss the prosecutor when the guilty verdict is brought in or scream at those jurors who were not convinced that the pimply-faced defendant was the buggerer of Jimmy and the dismemberer of Johnny.” It was clear he was mocking us for being so gauche as to attend a murder trial to honor my sister, to make her presence known to the jury, to remind them that there were people who loved her. Our trial received a great deal of press, and after the verdict, my mother and father used the media to express their outrage at having been betrayed by a judicial system they once believed in. Everyone who followed the trial was in awe of my parents’ composure and dignity throughout the process—everyone, it seemed, except my uncle.