Griffin Dunne has been an actor, producer, and director since the late 1970s. Among his work, he produced and acted in After Hours; he directed Practical Magic and the documentary The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt, Joan Didion. Griffin and his dog, Mary, live in the East Village of Manhattan.
“Griffin Dunne has given us a family history that is both humorous and heartbreaking. The Friday Afternoon Club is infused with the vitality that confidence in one's perceptions can bring and the ambiguity that accompanies the expense and strain of fame. Confessions of this order are works of art.” —Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum “Griffin Dunne has been entertaining people—both on-screen and off—all his life. And though you probably know him best as a gifted actor, make no mistake—Dunne is a real writer. The Friday Afternoon Club is a riveting and rollicking portrait of Dunne’s unconventional family as well as a deeply considered reckoning with the tragedy that exploded within it. He is honest about himself, generous with others, and insightful about every glittering and dark aspect of his richly lived years. He is also—like the best entertainers—ridiculously funny. This is just a wonderful memoir. Period.” —Alexandra Styron, author of Reading My Father “The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne’s singular memoir, is joyful, tragic, and resilient with a masterful, roving tone as varied as the actor-director-producer-author’s restless career. A self-described voracious reader and autodidact, Griffin renders the almost unbelievably American picaresque of his own and his family’s beginnings with a comic’s touch, and then has the spiritual maturity and writerly chops to handle both the looming tabloid heartbreak and its very personal, almost unbearable aftermath with unflinching honesty. Here is a talented man—flawed, injured, incomplete—a questing, charming, smart man taking on life (and death) day by day. His refusal of ‘closure,’ the original Hollywood ending, is courageous and exemplary, and, like his father, and his aunt and uncle, and a host of unrecorded Irish American spinners of bittersweet tales in his colorful ancestry, Griffin takes his rightful place in a family and tradition of real writers.” —David Duchovny