Overview

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.