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In what will be the most talked-about
memoir of the year, Sean Wilsey gives us his wise, electric,
and painfully funny story
"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.
Sean Wilsey's writing
has appeared in The London Review of Books, The
Los Angeles Times, and McSweeney's Quarterly,
where he is the editor at large. Before going to McSweeney's
he worked as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker,
a fact checker at Ladies' Home Journal, a letters
correspondent at Newsweek, and an apprentice gondolier
in Venice, Italy. He was born in San Francisco in 1970 and
now lives with his wife, Daphne Beal, and his son, Owen.
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