Griffin Dunne: The Friday Afternoon Club with Tobias Wolff

Join us on Thursday, June 20 at 7pm PT when we celebrate the release of Griffin Dunne's book, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, at 9th Ave! Dunne will be joined by none other than National Medal of Arts winner, Tobias Wolff.

Presented by Green Apple Books and Litquake

Doors at 6:30pm. The event will begin at 7pm.

This event is free to attend, but RSVP is required. Seating will be first come first serve. Please see our FAQ below for more details.

Books will be available for purchase. The evening will include a reading, discussion, and audience Q+A. Signing line to follow.

A livestream of this event will be available at the following link: https://youtube.com/live/nf1f5p26ka8?feature=share

Praise for The Friday Afternoon Club
“Searing and powerful . . . compelling in its honesty.” —Library Journal

“What a remarkable and moving story filled with twists and turns, the most famous of faces, and a complex family revealed with loving candor. I was blown away by Griffin Dunne’s life and his ability to capture so much of it in these beautifully written pages.” —Anderson Cooper

About The Friday Afternoon Club
Griffin Dunne’s memoir of growing up among larger-than-life characters in Hollywood and Manhattan finds wicked humor and glimmers of light in even the most painful of circumstances.

At eight, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne’s legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At sixteen, he got kicked out of boarding school, ending his institutional education for good. In his early twenties, he shared an apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel Des Artistes with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor working as a popcorn concessionaire at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the midst of it all, Griffin’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s. The outcome was a travesty of justice that marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne’s career as a crime reporter for Vanity Fair and a victims' rights activist.

And yet, for all its boldface cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no mere celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny, and moving characters—its author most of all.

About Griffin Dunne
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.

About Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief; the novel Old School, and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Story Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2015 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, and in 2024 the Hadada Award from the Paris Review for his “strong and unique commitment to literature.”

FAQs

• Seating will be first come, first serve. Priority seating will be given to wheelchair users and those with mobility devices and other attendees with disabilities. Standing room will be available after seats fill.
• This is an in-person, ticketed event. Please consider checking out our livestream (detailed above) should seats run out.
• If your plans change and you are unable to attend the event, please kindly adjust your RSVP to make room for guests on the waitlist.

Accessibility

• The venue is located on ground level, and there are no stairs between the entrance and event space.
• If you require space for a wheelchair or mobility device, you can choose a specification at checkout.