As a movie-business memoir, it is brisk and classy. Dunne’s sex and drugs years give it a Bret Easton Ellis feel, without quite the same level of brashness, and there is plenty of name-dropping, though most of it is well earned.

Dunne largely bears...slings and arrows with good humor and equanimity, conscious, perhaps, that in retelling them he becomes the hero of the joke. He gets terrific mileage from his own bad luck.

So honest and funny and smart.

By turns quirky, candid, passionate, heart-rending and inspiring, The Friday Club is a splendidly told tale of the tragicomedy we call life..

Much of The Friday Afternoon Club is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born.

Here he uses his authorial gifts — a filmmaker’s eye, photographic memory and way with a quip — to great effect, exploring how the seemingly charmed lives of the Dunnes unraveled.

At its energetic best when Dunne recounts his own California adolescence amid celebrity and debauchery.

With a breezy style, Dunne chronicles how his family got through good times and bad — despite interfamilial spats — by coming together as a family when it counted..

Though subtitled A Family Memoir, this book is really about Mr. Dunne and his father. Irish touchstones, such as wit, guilt and silence, are all here, spangled with late-20th-century Hollywood stardust.

Griffin spares no emotions in bringing readers the lion’s share of his life story.

Dunne’s storytelling is buoyant, his prose crisp; he’s most definitely a writer, too. This clear-eyed, heartfelt memoir ends with the birth of Dunne’s daughter in 1990; readers will hope for future books..

Raw and painful to read at times but compelling in its honesty, this memoir about the Dunnes will appeal to movie and true-crime fans..

Dunne’s writing is vivid, openhearted, and full of a rich irony that inflects even the most emotional scenes.

Moving.