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 ... The second part of the story recounts his sister’s death and the appalling criminal trial of her attacker, John Sweeney. We move from Less Than Zero territory into something more reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts, another indelible personal account of a murder trial involving a family member ... Though we witness Dunne morphing from self-confessed fibber into painfully candid memoirist, there is no sense that he is selling his family out here. His story is unsparing but also affectionate, alternately flattering and stark, depending on the scene. What emerges is a novelistic and compelling account of a life, and a self-deprecating guide to the Dunnes’s many highs and lows. It is a fond yet riveting family portrait.
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