Oh the glory of it all
by Sean Wilsey
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Wilsey takes us on a tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families. His blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City) is a 1980s society-page staple, entertaining Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse; his enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade. When Sean turns nine, 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 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; then he 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.--From publisher description.
Previews available in: English
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People
Places
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Oh the Glory of It All
2008, Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Electronic resource
in English
0786569158 9780786569151
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Book Details
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Originally published: Penguin Press, 2005.
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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."
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