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The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir
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86/99
Critics
77/99
Readers
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Scholars
74/99
Rating
98/99
Volume
57/99
Rating
97/99
Volume
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About This Book
At nine, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion's legendary L.A. party for the publication of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In his early 20s, he shared an apartment in Manhattan's Hotel Des Artistes with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher, while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor working as a popcorn seller at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the midst of it all, Griffin's 22-year-old sister Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s, which ended in a travesty of justice that also somehow marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne's career as a bestselling author of true crime narratives.And yet, for all its bold-face cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that brilliantly embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny and moving characters - its author most of all - finding wicked, self-deprecating humour and glints of surprising light in even the most harrowing and painful of circumstances.
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Reviews
"Though we witness Dunne morphing from self-confessed fibber into painfully candid memoirist, there is no sense that he is selling his family out here."
"Most will find it both bracing and incredibly human."
"By turns quirky, candid, passionate, heart-rending and inspiring, The Friday Club is a splendidly told tale of the tragicomedy we call life."
"Dunne largely bears...slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, conscious, perhaps, that in retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke."
"Here he uses his authorial gifts — a filmmaker's eye, photographic memory and way with a quip — to great effect, exploring how the seemingly charmed lives of the Dunnes unraveled ..."
"It would be easy to dismiss a memoir by someone like Griffin who had every break in life, but this one is a gem written with sharp humor the perspective of someone who's seen it all and knows it."
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