Book talk: A memoir of grief and glamour
Griffin Dunne's The Friday Afternoon Club w Ann Kennedy Smith
Substack offers so many opportunities to connect with other writers who share an interest in books. Last July, when I put together a themed list, Reading Sibling Stories including Griffin Dunne’s family memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club,
of the Substack Featured Publication popped into the comments to let me know she was planning to read it, too.Ann’s deeply researched weekly writing on the women associated with Cambridge— writers, students, lecturers, and wives from the Victorian era through the mid-20th century—and the photos she posts of the academic library and surrounding campus and town make me feel I’ve upgraded my IQ by association. I had to know what this literary biographer would think of Dunne’s Joan Didion-adjacent celebrity memoir. Though it took us awhile to coordinate our schedules across seven time zones, we met recently to discuss.
Dunne’s memoir centers on the October 30, 1982 attack on his sister, actress Dominique Dunne of Poltergeist fame, at age 22 by her ex-boyfriend John Sweeney, showing how this event changes the sibling relationships throughout the family including the relationship between his father, Dominick Dunne, and his brother John, already strained by the disparity in their fortune and fame. Dominique later died on November 5.
I wanted to know what Ann, a researcher and biographer, would make of how Dunne navigates the tension between preserving the truth and correcting the record on his famous family when so much of their lives has been documented in the press. Our conversation brought up threads of connection between memoir, primary sources like letters, and fiction. And we explored the tension inherent when famous professional writers use their family stories in their work— and the value of more peripheral storytellers to complete the picture.
Read on for a UK travel tip from Ann as well!
Book Talk with Ann Kennedy Smith
Hello Ann. Thanks so much for agreeing to talk with me about this book. I’m curious: what first drew you to The Friday Afternoon Club?
Ann Kennedy Smith: I remember I bought it in Belfast airport. When a book first comes out, if you happen to be flying somewhere, it’s worth having a look in the bookshop because they’ll often have a special paperback version. It’s a little cheaper and easier to carry than a hardback, so I tend go for those.
The name Dunne was vaguely familiar—obviously I know Joan Didion. But I supposed I liked the cover with its retro appeal of a 1970s photograph of an idealized version of a family. Then of course when you read it, it’s not quite that.
No, it’s not. I picked it up because I knew Dunne from the documentary he produced about his aunt, Joan Didion Dunne, toward the end of her life, “The Center Will Not Hold.” I didn’t really know his acting career, but his sister Dominique Dunne starred in the first horror film I ever saw, “Poltergeist.” I was very young and a babysitter was watching— it made quite an impression. I remember hearing that the actress had died violently, and so I think it was one of the first times I was aware of horror beyond the movies, too. When I saw this book, I wanted to know the family story.
Ann Kennedy Smith: I didn’t know any of the details of Dominique Dunne’s murder. It’s quite a shocking beginning to the book and quite colors Griffin Dunne’s mostly humorous reminiscences of an extraordinary childhood. Then suddenly in the final third of the book you’re pitched into a very dark place. You’ve been prepared for it but by the end you feel differently about all the jolly adventures that the family went through. It’s very moving, I think.
Yes, I agree. And that’s one of the things Dunne tells us in the book as well. The family tradition was to keep things pleasant and keep secrets close. And I think part of what makes the telling so moving is that he breaks that tradition.
You’ve made me realize that the tendency the family had to keep things pleasant on the surface contributed to the tragedy. Because his mother Lenny’s big regret is that she knew Dominque’s murderer was threatening and abusing her but she told no one on the request of her daughter.
Ann Kennedy Smith: The Friday Afternoon Club contains a lot of black humor, but even in a terrible situation you can see how the family accesses that. They’ve had a horrible day in court, with the defense lawyer reading from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, to paint Dominique’s murderer as a young man desperately in love. The following day the family are having lunch in a restaurant during a break in the court proceedings. And with all the tension, they make a joke. As they roar with laughter, they see jurors in the restaurant as well, judging them as heartless with no awareness of the need for humor in that terrible situation.
It was so interesting to hear what it was like for them to sit through that trial, where Dominique’s death by strangulation at the hands of her estranged boyfriend was painted as her own fault.
Ann Kennedy Smith: At the time it was seen as anomalous for a family of a murder victim to turn up in court, which is extraordinary. It wasn’t that long ago, but how things have changed in that regard thanks not least to the efforts of Dominique’s extraordinary mother, who co-founded Justice for Homicide Victims.
Given your expertise in delving into archives and researching biography, how do you consider memoir when it comes to filling in the gaps in the primary sources, so we can understand how things have changed? Do you use them in your work?
When it comes to a memoir, we’re often hearing stories that might have been told so many times around the family table that they will have got embroidered and altered slightly. That’s the nature of memoir and I’m always very conscious of it.
I got into this type of research because my background was in French and English literature, and then about 10 years ago I did a Masters in creative writing, and realized I really wanted to write biography.
As part of that course, I also did a module in writing memoir and absolutely loved it. I had no idea I’d actually want to write something for others to read, but I wrote an essay about an episode from my childhood. But when my mother (who is always very generous in her praise of my writing) read it, she said: “Yes, but it’s fiction, isn’t it?” But for me, everything I’d written was true. How much more difficult it must be when you produce a whole book.
Soon afterwards I became very interested in the history of women at Cambridge in the Victorian era. There weren’t many women students and lecturers, and I became interested in the women who married their lecturers and stayed on. They formed clubs and communities and societies, and wrote and received several letters a day. I think we have a way of looking at Victorian ladies as completely different from us. But it's only when you read their letters that you say “No, that could have been written today.”
I became particularly interested in Ida Darwin, who married Charles Darwin’s youngest son Horace. There are more letters in Ida’s archive than in Charles Darwin’s, but the university library at first didn’t want them because she wasn’t a famous scientist. But they’re remarkable documents that give you such a picture of family and university life. You can learn a lot from one person’s perspective.
I love those examples. It reminds me of one of the stories where letters or notes come into play in The Friday Afternoon Club. The brothers, Griffin’s father Dominick and John Dunne, who was married to Joan Didion— they have a falling out. John and Joan vacate the country during the trial, ostensibly to prevent their teenage daughter Quintana from having to take the stand but of course the family feels abandoned in their time of need. Meanwhile, once they’ve returned, Dominick has become convinced that John and Joan are continuing to eat at Ma Maison.
Ann Kennedy Smith: That’s the bit about the restaurant where they would go to mingle with the stars, where they invited Dominique.
Yes, and that’s where she met the man who would become her killer who was a sous-chef there, to Wolfgang Puck. And so the third brother Alex, plays a trick on John and Joan. During the trial he sends an orchid with a note, pretending to be from the restaurant owner and gloating over the not-guilty verdict.
And later, Griffin has read an article his uncle John has published about another celebrity trial, in which he complains about how tacky it is for the family of the victim to attend. Griffin writes him a letter to express his anger, and delivers it by messenger then waits for a reply. It’s all very dramatic.
Ann Kennedy Smith: You know, it’s almost always better to talk with someone if you have an issue. But you can see Griffin has taken his uncle’s article as an accusation that it was inappropriate for the Dunne family to attend Dominique's trial. This was grotesque really, so it made perfect sense for him to write down his objections.
And when the uncle’s reply comes, it puts them on the spot about the orchid. He knows it was a trick and that Griffin must know who did it.
Ann Kennedy Smith: Their sister and daughter had just been murdered. They’re allowed to react emotionally and do crazy things! John Dunne and Joan Didion possibly did not have the emotional bandwidth to understand how under such distressing circumstances someone might do something they might not otherwise.
But you know, it was very heartening to read about the closeness of Griffin and his brother Alex. And of course we learn that the title comes from a regular Friday afternoon gathering that their sister Dominique instigated. It’s so cruel how she was taken from them.
Your point about the emotional bandwidth of the Didion-Dunnes seems right to me. Did you know she dedicated her novel Democracy to Dominique and Quintana? And in it, she depicts scenes of the sister of the main character on life support after an attempt on her life, and how the family decides to take her off of that, and they’re almost exactly aligned to the same scenario with Dominique as Griffin Dunne describes it in his memoir? And she also borrows the note— the unhinged, jealous brother in the novel sends a similar note to the brother with the upper hand.
Ann Kennedy Smith: And was Quintana still alive when that novel was written? I did not know that. Did you know when you read it, that it would be so similar?
Yes, it was 1984 so two years after Dominique tied and Quintana was still a teenager. But I didn’t know she’d borrowed from the family tragedy. It was just a literary coincidence that I read The Friday Afternoon Club first for July’s themed list about Reading Sibling Stories and then for an August list Reading about the 1970s I picked up the novel— and there it was. If I hadn’t read Griffin’s book, I never would have connected the dots.
Ann Kennedy Smith: People might not know where she got that idea from. The person who writes gets to tell the story, I guess. I wrote recently about Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Woolf spent two weeks comforting her sister, and then when she got home, the first thing she did was write down all her memories and impressions of Julian, and that's a very interesting document because it's almost unfiltered. She's a professional writer, but she didn't come back and work on it later.
Then it had a sort of afterlife. It was included in Quentin Bell (Julian's brother) biography of Woolf, but he said something like, “This says more about my aunt than it does about my brother.” It's a little bit of a double-jab at Woolf. (“She didn't really know my brother. I did.)” He had ambivalent feelings towards his aunt and the Bloomsbury set, as his life was very much lived in their shadow. So it's kind of, “How dare she write about my brother?”
But she was writing about how she saw him. You know, we as readers feel glad to have it, not just because it's Virginia Woolf, but because she captures something of Julian’s spirit, which you can't always get through letters. And I think that's part of the value of memoir, having a perspective by somebody who's got a writer's eye for the important details.
Some of Griffin Dunne’s stories are exaggerated for comic effect, but I loved The Friday Afternoon Club. His observations sum up a particular era, and it's fascinating not just to get ‘the secrets of the stars’, but have an insider’s view of that glamorous life, especially now that most of those people have gone.
Thank you, Ann, for sharing these thoughts with me!
Looking for more Didion-adjacent perspective?
Out November 12,
’s Didion & Babitz draws upon boxes of unsent letters Eve Babitz wrote to friends, lovers, ex-boyfriends, frenemies, and mentors— most notably Joan Didion, who dominated the latter two categories—to argue that the two were essentially a single woman split in two. Griffin Dunne makes several cameos, and Anolik has also conducted hundreds of interviews with those closest to Eve Babitz and Joan Didion on the Hollywood scene, to flesh out the contrasts and the drama between the two women, mostly from Babitz’s perspective.Didion & Babitz is a salty take on Joan Didion’s ambition and aloofness, and her willingness to make sloppy Eve the butt of the joke while simultaneously helping her to launch her writing career. At the same time, it shows how Eve’s connections made Didion who she was, as well— there would be no The White Album without Eve providing entree for Joan to Jim Morrison’s studio.
If you love Anolik’s Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College podcast series, about the 1990s literary brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt, the gossipy tone of this book will not disappoint. Forewarning: the way she handles outing John Dunne as likely queer, something neither he nor Joan Didion nor anyone else close to the couple publicly discussed when he was alive, will discomfit anyone who believes the choice to die in the closet means one should be allowed to remain there.
In the meantime, if this title interests you, check out this gem of a clip of Eve calling in during Joan’s appearance on C-SPAN’s Book TV in 2000 gives a sense of their vibe as you wait for your pre-order to arrive.
In case you missed it
Ann’s post about Virginia Woolf’s memories of Julian Bell: Charming and violent and gifted.
has organized what she calls the Joan Didion Group Project, featured this weekend on Substack’s The Weekender including her post Cranky Joan Didion holds a grudge. As a result, several posts about Joan Didion have hit Substack this October. Here are a few you might like: I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be. Joan Didion’s Blue NightsAnd some of my own related posts:
I’ll be back to October’s theme, reading about environmental activism for one more post this month. This conversation with Ann has made me want to return to a family-related theme for November’s list… I’ve been meaning to read Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai for ages and I do think it’s time.
What’s your favorite celebrity memoir? Juicy podcast?
What do you make of the resurgence of interest in Eve Babitz and Joan Didion right now?
Have any suggestions for good family-themed pairings for Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai?
Thanks so much for featuring me in your series, Abra, and it was a great pleasure to discuss such an interesting memoir with you. I love your recommendations and will try to get hold of the Babitz book soon!
I have yet to read Babitz! Wild right?! Thanks so much for sharing my article. I’ve loved this month of Didion 💜