Oh the Glory of It All

by Sean Wilsey Narrated by Scott Brick

Overview

"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.

Editorial Reviews

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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)

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.
— The New York Times

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.

From the Publisher

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

“Sean Wilsey's magnificent memoir spares no one but forgives almost everything; it's a kindly act of retribution that's sure to ring a bell with any adult survivor of parental narcissism. A bell, hell. Oh the Glory of It All becomes a veritable carillon of remembered pain, never once losing its wise and worldly sense of humor. I couldn't stop reading the damn thing.” —Armistead Maupin

“Exuberant, honest, and unforgettable. Wilsey shows that great privilege doesn't guarantee bliss, but also doesn't preclude it. I'm glad he survived this odd/epic youth and emerged from it such a sane, generous, and funny narrator. My only regret is that he's not older than he is, since there would be more to read.” —George Saunders

“[A] startlingly honest tale. . . . The writing is vivid, detailed, deep, and filled with fresh metaphors.” —Publishers Weekly

“Honest to a fault, richly veined with indelible images: a monumental piece of work.” —Kirkus Reviews

OCT/NOV 05 - AudioFile

Sean Wilsey’s memoir of growing up in 1980s’ San Francisco reads like over-the-top fiction. Despite his privileged background, family neglect supplies Wilsey with more than his share of neuroses, narcissism, and self-destructive behavior, which lead him ultimately to a boarding school in Italy, where he turns his life around. Scott Brick starts off slowly with a bit too much melodrama but quickly finds his groove. Brick brings a grounded sensibility to Wilsey’s character, honestly portraying the anger, fear, and loneliness of his adolescent years. Thanks to Brick’s solid reading and Wilsey’s no-holds-barred reporting, this exposé is an entertaining look at an unbelievable world. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169436815
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/19/2005
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

EXCESS!

IN THE BEGINNING we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.

PART ONE Useless Emotion

One MOM
She went on: The people began to come in droves. . . . One lady started for the altar and her little girl about 11 years of age held on to her saying, "Mama, don't go up there. Them women will beat you on the back." But the mother went right on and was saved. One night here came two brothers carrying their brother. They made a pack saddle to bring him in. They had found him hidden in a wagon trying to get away from them and from God . . . such shouting, such victory. An old drunkard was saved one night and was elected Sunday School Superintendent at the close of the Revival. A Dr. came out from Gouldbusk, Texas one night. It had been noised abroad that Jesus was in our midst. He knew me before my marriage. He said before the service, "Myrtle, I have never seen such." He said, "Many here are paying my old bills. I never expected to collect." He knew them all. He had been their doctor for several years. We were using old-fashioned gasoline lamps. He publicly said, "I will furnish all the gasoline you need to keep this meeting going. I am a shouting Methodist, so more power to all of you for such a work."
When they were done saving souls for the day they liked to lie down in the grass together and make one. It was a romantic, wild, daring life. Riding horses. Preaching in prisons. Taking alms (once from the KKK, my aunt Faye recalled, saying, "It was money, it was in the name of the Lord, so he took it."). Cutting hair. Cutting stone. Preaching in oil fields where just before, my grandmother wrote, "an evangelist, not a Nazarene, had his tent and all equipment burned by some disgruntled person or persons. At times it seemed like our fate might be the same." They built and integrated a church, then saw it burned down as a result (KKK again). They lay down to bed in the open air.

. . .  Star . . .
When they arrived in a new town my grandfather would pitch the tent, borrow a piano, and start preaching. Eventually he'd muster up a congregation, find a suitable plot of land, somehow get it bought or donated, build the church, requisition a full-time minister, and move on. Grandmother wrote: "Always it seemed that each revival was better than the one before. We could have stayed on longer than we did, but my husband felt others could take this work and we would move on . . . with no home, no church, and no salary we went. The children used to changing schools would settle down."
From

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Oh the Glory of It All"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Sean Wilsey.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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