Actor-producer Griffin Dunne’s The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir (Atlantic) has two distinct parts – before and after his sister Dominique’s murder. In the sunnier days, there’s growing up in Hollywood: Dad is closeted TV producer (and future star writer) Dominick Dunne. There are movie stars in your house– your first babysitter is Elizabeth Montgomery – and in the pool: Sean Connery saves you from drowning; Carrie Fisher’s your BFF (her mother, Debbie Reynolds, subsidises your Manhattan flat). Then, Dominique is brutally killed by her ex. There’s a disastrous court case; the family splinters (Uncle John and his wife, Joan Didion, decamp to Europe during the trial), and rallies. Dunne writes with a wry self-awareness, casting himself as the callow kid shocked into maturity.
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne. Photo / supplied
Essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley’s Grief is For People (Serpent’s Tail) ties together a robbery of her jewellery with the death by suicide of a close friend, “a charming Southern boy who looked like a draft of Rob Lowe”. She writes: “Suicide, unlike most deaths, is math you work backward instead of forward.” It’s not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions, said the Washington Post. “Marvellously tender,” thought Kirkus Reviews.
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley. Photo / supplied
Some might not know Michael Richards by name, but they will know Cosmo Kramer from Seinfield. In Entrances and Exits (Permuted Press), Richards notes that he auditioned for the role of “Kessler” three times, not knowing, as Jerry Seinfeld writes in the foreword, that Seinfeld never had anyone else in mind for the character. Richards writes of his early days, born to an Italian-American mother and unknown father, some of his personal life and his early career. But the core of the book is his insider knowledge of the show and its unique foursome, all written with that familiar restless energy.
