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Oh the Glory of It All Hardback - 2005
by Wilsey, Sean
- Used
- very good
- Hardback
- Signed
"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.
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Details
- Title Oh the Glory of It All
- Author Wilsey, Sean
- Binding Hardback
- Edition First Edition
- Condition Used - Very good
- Pages 496
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Penguin Press HC, The, New York, New York, U.S.A.
- Publication date 2005-05-19
- Bookseller's Inventory # 327203
- ISBN 9781594200519 / 1594200513
- Weight 1.67 lbs (0.76 kg)
- Dimensions 9.88 x 6.54 x 1.59 in (25.10 x 16.61 x 4.04 cm)
- Size 6x1x9
- Category Biography / Autobiography
- Library of Congress subjects San Francisco (Calif.), Montandon, Pat
- Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2004063420
- Dewey Decimal Code B
- Quantity available 1
- Bookseller catalogues Literature
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Summary
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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