“Grief is just not one note,” Griffin Dunne remarked in an interview with Kelly Clarkson. He refers to the death of his sister and how he honored her in his humorous memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir.
I have known Griffin Dunne as the lead character in my favorite Martin Scorsese movie, After Hours (1985), which is why I quickly read through FAC. In doing so, I discovered that he played the werewolf in An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Uncle Nick in the third season of This Is Us. How did I not know this? Additionally, he was friends with Carrie Fisher when both were trying to establish their acting careers.
What interested me the most about his memoir was his retelling of his sister’s death, the subsequent trial, and the Dunne family’s resilience in moving forward and strengthening their relationships. This book is definitely worth reading. I enjoyed the incidental celebrity encounters from Griffin’s younger days and his realization that he should have developed contacts earlier in his career, instead of struggling along the way. He mentioned that his own struggles mirrored the character he portrayed in After Hours.
To conclude, here’s a passage that reflects Griffin’s inner turmoil, along with links to a CBS Sunday Morning interview and After Hours footage.
“The peace I found living on the beach was intermittently shattered every time I heard 'Every Breath You Take' by The Police, which topped the charts that summer and was impossible to escape. It was a sinister song about a man obsessed with a woman he would never let out of his sight. I heard a threat of violence in the lyrics, should the woman ever think about leaving him.
'Every move you make / And every vow you break / Every smile you fake / Every claim you stake / I’ll be watching you.'
It pained me when some of my intelligent women friends embraced 'Every Breath' as a love song. They thought having a man so obsessed with a woman was sexy and romantic, while I found the character Sting portrayed to be a sick individual, one who would ultimately kill the woman he sings about and anyone else if he had the chance.”
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