Griffin Dunne on His Fascinating, Complicated Family, His ‘Hilarious’ Friendship With Carrie Fisher and Directing ‘Practical Magic’

Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Griffin Dunne‘s family has done so many larger-than-life, unbelievable things that when the actor-director-producer started to write his memoir “The Friday Afternoon Club: A Memoir of Family,” he realized it wasn’t enough to start the story with his complex writer father Dominick Dunne. In fact, it was impossible to understand the forces that shaped the Dunnes, including his uncle John Gregory Dunne and sister Dominique Dunne — without understanding his father’s abusive upbringing in an Irish Catholic family, his mother’s Mexican heritage and all great love stories, clandestine affairs, celebrity encounters and tragedies that seem to surround them, buffeted with lots of pitch-black mordant humor. The heart of the new memoir is the 1982 murder of Griffin Dunne’s younger sister, “Poltergeist” star Dominique Dunne.

It’s the first time he’s really grappled with telling the story of that pivotal event in his family’s history. The pain of her loss was intertwined with the rise of his father’s magazine writing career, after Dominick Dunne wrote about the trial for Vanity Fair. Griffin Dunne, who recently played a character based on David Carr in Max’s “The Girls on the Bus,” displays his family’s gift for melding deft humor while recounting catastrophic events as he remembers the significant figures in his life including his best friend Carrie Fisher, his aunt Joan Didion and his brother Alex Dunne.

Along the way Griffin Dunne drops revelations about his father’s hidden life, coming to terms with his own sexuality during a time when a party guest casually groping a teenager wasn’t discussed, not to mention his mother’s stillbirths and other traumatic moments. Variety talked to Dunne about his family, career and growing up in Beverly Hills during the last gasps of old Hollywood. Why was this the right time for a memoir? Writing a book had been in the back of my mind on a very small bucket list: to write a book, learn Spanish and play the guitar.

And I’ve only gotten as far as the book. You started out with the idea of writing a series of anecdotes like David Sedaris does. What changed? The whole book changed for me once I realized that to