Book Review: The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir; The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper

(Borrowed from a friend): Griffin Dunne's memoir of his storied family is a fast, fascinating read. Everyone from Sean Connery to Buddy Hackett makes an appearance. Dunne's father Dominick was a TV and movie producer who reveled in friendships with big Hollywood names, throwing parties and dropping names. But it all came crashing down when his alcoholism, drug abuse, and closeted homosexuality caught up with him and destroyed his marriage and his career. The family was further devastated when Griffin's sister Dominique was strangled by her boyfriend. This launched Dominick's second career as a novelist and crime reporter for Vanity Fair. Griffin grew up amid movie stars and studio execs. HIs aunt and uncle were the screenwriting team John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion who also became one of the country's foremost essayists and cultural observers. Griffin recounts his roller-coaster ride as actor and producer with wit and compassionate. The anecdotes of his friendship with Carrie Fisher are riotous and his recount of the ordeal of Dominique's murder are gut-wrenching. I had a hard time reading that section because I knew the unjust outcome.

After reading Griffin's memoir, I dug out Dunne's earlier book The Way We Lived Then. I had bought it several years ago for the pictures of movie stars enjoying themselves at Dunne family gatherings and soirees but never read the text. The son's work is more revealing. Dominick's subtitle Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper is accurate. The emphasis is on Dunne Sr.'s acquittances with the rich and famous and his Hollywood days before he was booted out of the industry. He does not even mention his gay connections. Dominique's death is included in an afterword. Perhaps it was too painful for him to fully recount. The pictures are fun to look at.

Book Review: South and West: From a Notebook

(Taken out of Jackson Heights Library) "In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death  but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology." What an opening sentence. Joan Didion's rough drafts are more intoxicating than the finished versions of most writers. This brief treat is taken from Didion's notes for two articles never finished. In the first longer segment, she and her husband travel from New Orleans and head into the South with no particular agenda. In the second, much shorter vignette, she has gone to San Francisco to cover the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone, but winds up writing about herself and her relationship to California the state where she grew up. What emerges is a sharp portrait of a particular place and time. The South cannot forget the past and is trapped by it--to a certain extent, they still are 50 years later. The West has no past and only looks forward. It's very short, you can read it in less than two hours, but Didion will haunt you with her indelible images.