Stephanie Danler and Griffin Dunne on John Gregory Dunne’s ‘Vegas’ at 92NY
Join us at 92NY as bestselling author Stephanie Danler and acclaimed actor Griffin Dunne discuss John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season.
Thursday, June 12 | 7:30 PM ET
92NY | Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center
1395 Lexington Ave | New York, NY 10128
Stephanie Danler, author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter and Stray, joins acclaimed actor Griffin Dunne for a reading and conversation about Dunne’s uncle, John Gregory Dunne, and his classic memoir recently reissued by McNally Jackson Editions, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season.
John Gregory Dunne spent much of his career as a writer in the shadow of his wife, the great Joan Didion — and in 1970, panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his failings as a writer and a husband, he left her and their three-year old child in for the Vegas Strip. The memoir he wrote there, Vegas, has been hailed as “the best book about Sin City ever written” (Esquire) — a strikingly honest portrait of a city and a writer brought low by American life, shimmering with rare vitality and power. As Stephanie Danler puts it in her introduction to the new reissue, “the book stands — proudly — on its own, away from the Didion–Dunne mythology, as a weird and provocative piece of New Journalism and an absolute roller coaster of the burnt-out, turned on, deadbeat, broken down, and delusional.”
Offering profound personal insight into the book’s inspiration and the life of his uncle, hear Griffin Dunne read from this neglected classic, followed by a discussion with Danler about her own relationship with the city and the book — Dunne’s complex literary status via his marriage with Didion, Las Vegas as a fractured mirror of life in the US as a whole, why Dunne has proved to be such a durable inspiration for a new generation of writers, and much more.
John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003) was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist. His books include five novels, seven works of narrative nonfiction, and a posthumous collection of essays. He and his wife, Joan Didion, collaborated on many screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, the Barbra Streisand version of A Star is Born, and True Confessions. Two of his books, The Studio and Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, are about working in the movie business.
Stephanie Danler is a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of Stray and the international bestseller Sweetbitter. She is the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter television series on Starz.
Griffin Dunne has been an actor, producer, and director since the late 1970s. Among his work, he produced and acted in After Hours; he directed Practical Magic and the documentary The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt, Joan Didion. Griffin and his dog, Mary, live in the East Village of Manhattan.