In Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance, the French writer Alain describes his forthcoming book. “It’s really about irony. How ironic life can be,” he says. “How we’re ruled by chance and coincidence. And what a farce life is—a black farce.”
This could describe actor, director, and producer Griffin Dunne’s irony-haunted new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, in which he reflects on chance encounters and mystical coincidences from his 1960s childhood to the 1990 birth of his daughter (named after the lead character in Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters). Dunne is known for recent acting roles in The Girls on the Bus and This Is Us but also for 1980s cult films, including An American Werewolf in London and After Hours. The latter, directed by a then down-on-his-luck Martin Scorsese, turns Lower Manhattan into a nocturnal theater of the absurd. “The misadventures of Paul Hackett, the main character, could only have happened to me,” writes Dunne in his family-centered book.
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