The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

The Friday Afternoon Club (2024) is a memoir by Griffin Dunne. It details Griffin’s life growing up surrounded by the elite of Hollywood and Manhattan, with the narrative anchored by the eventual murder of his sister, Dominique. Griffin belongs to a well-known family in the literary and Hollywood worlds, and he is an actor, director, and producer himself. Films that he produced include After Hours (which he also starred in), Practical Magic, and the documentary The Center Will Not Hold, which is about his aunt Joan Didion.

This guide refers to the Grove Press UK 2024 Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, graphic violence, physical abuse, sexual harassment, child sexual abuse, child abuse, pregnancy loss, child death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, mental illness, illness, addiction, and substance use.

Language Note: While SuperSummary study guides typically refer to a book’s author by last name, this guide will refer to Griffin Dunne as “Griffin” throughout, both to avoid confusion with other members of the Dunne family and to emphasize the continuity between Griffin Dunne the author and Griffin Dunne the protagonist.

Summary

The Friday Afternoon Club is split into two parts, with the first part covering Griffin’s family background and his own early years, including schooling and his eventual foray into acting; the second part focuses on the Dunnes’ lives following the murder of Griffin’s sister, Dominique Dunne. The book opens with a Prologue that details how Ellen “Lenny” Griffin Dunne, Griffin’s mother, received a visit from Detective Harold Johnston with news that Dominique had been strangled by a man named John Sweeney.

Lenny was born to an Arizonian rancher father and a mother from a prominent Mexican family. Following school, she moved to New York to pursue acting, and when that didn’t yield much success, she set her sights on finding a husband. Dominick “Nick” Dunne, Lenny’s eventual husband, was the oldest son of Dr. Richard Dunne, a successful cardiologist but a brutal father, who was especially harsh toward a sensitive Nick. Nick and Lenny met in New York, where he was stage-managing a children’s show, and despite his sexual attraction to men, which he kept a secret, he was smitten with Lenny, and they married soon after. Griffin was born a year after his parents’ wedding, and soon after his younger brother, Alex, was born, the family moved to California. Some years later, and after multiple pregnancy losses, Lenny had a third child—a daughter, Dominique.

The Dunnes’ lives were star-studded in California, with Nick working in television and constantly hosting parties for countless Hollywood celebrities. When Nick’s brother John and John’s wife, the writer Joan Didion, also moved out to California, they were folded into this same social circle. John and Joan eventually went on to become far more popular and successful than Nick, especially after the latter’s socializing decreased dramatically after he and Lenny divorced when Griffin was 10 years old.

Griffin, who has dyslexia, struggled in school; shortly after his parents’ divorce, he was sent to an extremely strict, all-boys boarding school. His escapades continued even at boarding school, though in these years, he also made some fast friends and went through numerous rites of passage, including having sex for the first time. Griffin also became Lenny’s confidante and drinking partner as he grew older, learning about his father’s sexuality and numerous affairs with men throughout his parents’ marriage.

When Griffin was in high school, Alex brought home a girl he claimed to be in love with: Carrie Fisher, who would later become an actress most famous for starring as Princess Leia in Star Wars. Although Alex and Fisher never ended up dating, Fisher and Griffin developed an instant rapport from the moment they met, and they maintained a close friendship until her death many years later. After Griffin was expelled from high school in his last year for smoking marijuana, he moved to New York with the dream of becoming an actor. Fisher joined him shortly after, and the two friends even lived together as roommates for a time. Griffin moved out again when Fisher was catapulted into fame after her role in Star Wars, changing her life forever and their dynamic for a brief time.

While in New York, Griffin frequently called home and kept in touch with Lenny and Dominique. Shortly before Griffin’s move to New York, Lenny had broken the news to her children that she had multiple sclerosis, and Dominique, who had joined an acting group, lived with her. The two would share their concerns with each other about their other sibling, Alex, whose mental health was volatile. At one point, Alex committed himself to a psychiatric hospital in Vancouver, where he was living, after attempting suicide; he escaped the facility and fled to New York, where he sought shelter with Griffin before eventually moving out on his own. Nick, on the other hand, was doing better after having gotten himself blackballed from Hollywood for his drinking and drug use, among other things. He moved to Oregon, joined a support group to get sober, and began to write a novel. He eventually moved to New York as well after the death of his youngest brother, Stephen.

Griffin slowly began finding work in movies, from producing movies to landing a starring role in An American Werewolf in London. Meanwhile, Dominique’s career had truly begun to blossom, especially after she landed a role in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. She also began dating a man named John Sweeney, who worked as a sous-chef at a restaurant called Ma Maison. Neither Nick nor Dominique’s brothers liked Sweeney, but they didn’t share their opinions too strongly with Dominique. A month before Halloween, Dominique finally broke up with Sweeney because his increasingly jealous and controlling behavior toward her had culminated in violence, as he tried to strangle her. A few days before Halloween, however, she called Griffin with second thoughts about taking Sweeney back. An irritated Griffin cut the conversation short, and two days later, he received a call from Nick, who said that Sweeney had strangled Dominique again.

The Dunnes, united in Los Angeles again, visited Dominique every day in the hospital, where she was connected to life support after the attack. After five days, however, they consented to withdraw life support. Following her funeral, Griffin, Nick, and Alex all returned to New York before reuniting once again in Los Angeles for Sweeney’s trial. The trial was an ordeal for the entire family, with the presiding judge, Judge Burton Katz, taking an immediate dislike to the Dunnes and favoring the defense attorney, Mike Adelson. Throughout the trial, he continually allowed Adelson to withhold important information from the jury, including evidence of Sweeney’s past history of violence toward women. As a result, the jury delivered a verdict of not guilty of second-degree murder. Sweeney was in prison for less than three years, with time served on a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

A furious Nick publicly chastised the judge for his failure to uphold justice, with the story gaining further traction when Nick published an account of the trial in Vanity Fair. This eventually propelled him to substantial success and fame, and Nick became Vanity Fair’s star reporter. Griffin, too, found brief success again with his producing and starring role in After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. However, a string of bad decisions following this saw his star dim again. A particularly bad decision, however, also led him to one of the best of his life—he met his eventual wife and the mother of his child, actress Carey Lowell, when they co-starred in the flop movie Me and Him. After Lowell unexpectedly became pregnant a few months into their relationship, the couple decided to keep the baby and get married before the birth. The book ends with Hannah Dunne’s birth: As Griffin held his newborn daughter for the first time, he felt his sister’s presence in the room with them.