"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 regularly entertains 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, "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: "Somebody has to win it, Sean. Why...
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"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 regularly entertains 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, "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: "Somebody has to win it, Sean. Why not me?"). After meeting Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, Sean hopes each one might come back to San Francisco and convince his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is ejected from San Francisco and sent spiraling through four boarding 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, the 80s, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, the misery of boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, the joy of skate-boarding, massage, the live of itinerant ministers in Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem (Connecticut), eventual salvation, . . . "Oh the Glory of It All" is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.
