Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey

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In this memoir, the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction is borne out, and readers are taken for a joyride through the elite social whorl of San Francisco's elite. "It was 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty' and Danielle Steel come to life." So writes Sean Wilsey, who spent his childhood as the neglected son of what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "careless people," adults distilled to a state of complete self-absorption. Wilsey's sporadically unhinged mother tries to convince Sean to join her in a suicide pact -- in retaliation for his father's abandonment of the two in favor of her former best friend, Dede. For her part, Dede takes on the task of eliminating Sean from his father's life, convincing the child that he was unwanted, unloved, and a perpetual embarrassment to his successful dad. The man at the center of all this high-maintenance female attention is Al Wilsey, a butter magnate and no model of maturity and solid values. He regularly escapes to the skies in his private helicopter and sends his troubled son off to a series of boarding schools rather than allow him to annoy his malevolent and manipulative new wife.

Wilsey's is a mesmerizing coming-of-age story, a tale of triumph over a loveless and isolated upbringing. It peels back the glittering trappings of the wealthy and lays bare those places where greed and power have usurped the morality, ethics, and instinctive decency that together comprise the best of humanity. Deeply troubling but ultimately hopeful, Wilsey's tale is a cautionary one -- for parents and parents-to-be. (Fall 2005 Selection)

From the Publisher

Sean's blond-bombshell mother regularly entertains Black Panthers and movie stars in the family's marble and glass penthouse. His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade. The three live happily together "eight-hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; in 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." But when his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend, Sean's life blows apart. His memoir shows us how he survived, spinning out a "deliriously searing and convincing" portrait of a wicked stepmother (The New York Times Book Review), a meeting with the pope, sexual awakening, and a tour of "the planet's most interesting reform schools" (Details). BACKCOVER: "A memoir that announces the debut of a remarkably gifted, daring and, yes, very funny, writer."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The cliché ‘truth is stranger than fiction' may well have been coined to describe Sean Wilsey's wild, wise, and whip-smart memoir."
—Elle

"[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

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

It's a sprawling kitchen sink of a memoir, stuffed to the gills with seemingly everything the author can remember about his youth and in dire need of some industrial-strength editing, but at the same time, an epic performance: by turns heartfelt, absurd, self-indulgent, self-abasing, silly and genuinely moving. A memoir that manages to encompass riffs about the joys of skateboarding, the woes of high society, the miseries of boarding school and the perils of new money and new age therapies with equal aplomb, a memoir that can make the reader remember - no, re-experience - what it was like to be a wretched child and even more wretched teenager with ridiculous, Proustian ease.

Publishers Weekly

Wilsey's Eggersesque memoir of growing up rich and dysfunctional is dependent for effect on its deadpan, forthright tone of voice, underscoring the impact of his humorous, unsettled childhood. Brick performs this with flair, inhabiting that voice with ease. Born to a wealthy older father and San Franciscan socialite, Wilsey had a childhood that combined overwhelming privilege with an unusual family dynamic (his father divorced his mother and married her best friend). He mines his lonely childhood amid the lap of luxury for its absurdist comic potential, finding nuggets of humor in the wreckage of a fortunate yet empty upbringing. Brick underplays the comic and emotional undercurrents with poker-faced sophistication. His oft-hushed tones belie the comedy of situations; he renders lines like "Sean, I have hot flashes.... I just thought you'd want to know what's going on with your mother" with as little fuss as possible. Capturing Wilsey's knowing, self-mocking tone, Brick's performance of this confusing, bittersweet childhood is, like the book itself, just the right mixture of comic and tragic. Simultaneous release with Penguin hardcover (Reviews, May 2). (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Wilsey (founding editor, McSweeney's) started life with a bang. The child of stars of San Francisco's social scene, he grew up watching his parents entertain the likes of Gloria Steinem, Eldridge Cleaver, and Shirley Temple. His mother was a blond bombshell, an author, and a society-page regular. His father, whose sole job, Wilsey believed, was to please his wife, would take Wilsey to school in a helicopter and buy him his first copy of Playboy when he began asking about sex at age nine. Then his parents divorced, and Dad ran off with Mom's best friend. From that point on, things were never the same. After a brief flirtation with suicide, his mother headed off on a global quest for world peace, introducing Wilsey along the way to such historical figures as Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin-and even the Pope. Wilsey details the trials of his particular brand of teenage life in an engrossing, entertaining, and often hilarious memoir that is sure to be in high demand. Recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/05.]-Ronald Ray Ratliff, Kansas State Univ. Lib., Manhattan Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A founding McSweeney's editor tells about his privileged and impressively troubled young years, with surprisingly few missteps on a well-worn path. Wilsey was blessed and cursed with an extraordinarily messy, dramatic, wealthy family that tore him to shreds when they weren't casting him aside. The story begins in a frantic flurry that the rest of the book-wonderfully lengthy by the standards of this generation, who normally sum things up in 180 or so loosely spaced pages-will wind itself trying to keep up with: "In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." Wilsey's father was a millionaire many times over, while his mother was a legendary beauty raised by itinerant heartland preachers-the pair of them whirling dervishes of Bay Area society, she hosting salons and he buzzing over Napa Valley in his helicopter. Wilsey was alternately obsessed over and ignored. Already withdrawn by the time his father (after having an affair with Danielle Steele) left his mother for her best friend, a rapacious social X-ray, he, not much later, became a full-blown delinquent. A rich kid cliche, he shuttled between his sniping parents and rambled through an '80s adolescence stoned and clueless, slumping further into a self-destructive despondency. Meanwhile, his mother dragged him and a retinue of children around the world in a surreal campaign for peace that was more exasperatingly arrogant one-woman theater (camera crews! meeting Gorbachev!) than humanitarian endeavor. Wilsey's prose can't hope to maintain its rather astonishing momentum through almost 500 pages, and so some stretches drag, especially those about the creepy program that seemsmore cult than school but that does manage to straighten the boy out. Only in his later years does the focus of Wilsey's self-lacerating style soften somewhat-he's not a writer you want to see mellow-but it's a small complaint. Honest to a fault, richly veined with indelible images: a monumental piece of work.

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