"[An] irreverent and remarkably candid memoir about growing up in
wealthy eighties San Francisco . . . rollicking, ruthless . . .
ultimately generous-hearted." --Vogue
**
"A vivid mix of brio, self-awareness and sophistication . . . writing
well is indeed the best revenge." --The New York Times Book Review
**
"A monumental piece of work." --Kirkus Reviews
"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the
beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey
takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest,
and most grandiose of families.
Sean's blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in
Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City) is a 1980s
society-page staple, regularly entertaining Black Panthers and movie
stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air
above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of
a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and
bridges and hills." His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop
Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in
public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the
urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. But your hands are."
When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns
nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best
friend. Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit
suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing
her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of
multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel
Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the
pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his
father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San
Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally
lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in
Italy.
With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of
preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding
schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide,
skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian
fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil,
masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged
list)--Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.
