The stories we tell

Two remarkable family memoirs stand out this month, both intriguing accounts of letterly families, if there is such a thing. Geographically they couldn’t be further apart: Joburg and Los Angeles, Riverlea and Hollywood. Kevin van Wyk is the elder son of the late writer and activist Chris van Wyk — the “irascible genius” of Irascible Genius: A Son’s Memoir — who lived in Riverlea, the so-called “Coloured area” bordering the bleak mine dumps of Jozi.

Chris was wickedly funny, but there was also a tough side to him. He loathed bullies and any kind of injustice. “Chris was plenty fallible,” Kevin writes, “but one quality he unambiguously possessed was integrity.” It’s no wonder he became an activist at a very young age.

He was astonishingly young, too, when he started writing poetry. By the age of 21, he had won the Olive Schreiner Prize for his collection of poems It Is Time to Go Home. He went on to write short stories, novels, and books for younger readers, and adapted Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom for children.

Griffin Dunne’s wildly entertaining The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir tells the story of his family. In the 1980s, at the height of Vanity Fair magazine’s influence, its ace writer was his father, Dominick Dunne. His brother was the journalist John Gregory Dunne, who was married to the celebrated writer Joan Didion. But Dominick slid into alcoholism and one too many gay affairs ended his marriage. And then catastrophe hit: Griffin’s younger sister Dominique was murdered by her boyfriend. The appalling trial that followed, in which the murderer received a ludicrously light sentence, was the start of Dominick’s late career as a superb courtside reporter.

His byline on the VF cover ratcheted up sales and the books he went on to write were bestsellers. Griffin is a natural storyteller, both wry and vulnerable, with his father’s magpie eye for a telling anecdote. He was eight when Sean Connery fished him out of the deep end of the swimming pool during one of their parties, his parents oblivious; at 13 he attended Didion’s famous launch party of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

These are two excellent memoirs about two vastly different families on opposite sides of the world, one deeply loving and stable, the other haunted by tragedy, but both linked by an inordinate love of words