More From Beverly Diehl

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About Beverly Diehl


Born in Ohio but a resident of Colorado Springs since 1955, Beverly has watched the city grow. Achieving a BA from what was then Colorado State College with later graduate work at CC and University of Birmingham, England, she began a 16-year teaching career, 10 years freelancing and full-time volunteering, before spending 26 years with the Pikes Peak Library District. Author of the teachers' guide, History of the Pikes Peak Region, she is still surrounded by books and serves as a board member with the Friends of the Pikes Peak Library District.

Beverly Diehl

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Briefly Noted


The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

Griffin Dunne
Penguin Press
385 pages pages
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Film actor and author Griffin Dunne’s Colorado connection, briefly noted in his charming, disarming and satisfying family memoir, is that he honed his acting skills as a teenager at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs where he “knocked it out of the park” as Jerry in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and was changed by the experience. Dunne was forced to leave the next semester after getting caught smoking hashish in the dorm the night before he was due to perform in Othello. This brief misadventure mirrors many others in young Dunne’s developing years as he relocates from coast to coast, rubs elbows with his parents’ Hollywood coterie, is best friends with Carrie Fisher and constantly adores his eclectic and glamorous parents, brother Alex and sister Dominique. Dominique’s 1982 murder at the hands of an abusive ex-boyfriend and the subsequent, highly publicized trial of her killer become the focus of much of the book’s second half. Dunne’s book rises well above the category of celebrity memoir to a true family memoir, unwaveringly honest and filled with moments of despair as well as laughter as the Dunnes pull together and fall apart, like most families, in the face of tragedy.