More From MB Partlow

Featured image for “Bacigalupi’s newest fantasy transports readers to Renaissance Italy”

About MB Partlow


MB Partlow (she/her) is a Colorado transplant who has written for the CS Indy, the Gazette, and Pikes Peak Parent, most prolifically in the area of food reviews. She is co-host of the Mysteries, Monsters, & Mayhem podcast, which allows her to indulge her curiosity and her sense of humor, while sharing both with the world. She reads across genres, and generally needs another cup of tea.

Image

Support Rocky Mountain Reader


Rocky Mountain Reader depends on generous contributions from readers to support our operations. Please consider making a donation that you can afford — one-time, monthly or yearly. Donations are tax-deductible.

Newsletter Updates


Subscribing is free! To subscribe, sign up to receive our weekly newsletter that will provide previews and links to upcoming content, literary news items from around Colorado and more.

Briefly Noted


The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

Griffin Dunne
Penguin Press
385 pages pages
Image

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.