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A review by irena_smith
Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey
4.0
The first Goodreads review I saw pretty much nails it: "weird and funny and engrossing and moving... awkward and good." Also long (479 pages). But I didn't want it to end, not for a minute. There's a scene early on in which young Sean cuts a strategically placed hole in a Playboy centerfold and tries to... you know. "I love you," he says to the centerfold. "I want to have babies with you." The description continues: "I pressed myself down and she crinkled. This was not glorious."
I mean, how do you not continue reading? Especially after Sean's wealthy father leaves his mother for her gold-digging best friend, the best friend's ex-husband marries author Danielle Steel (who apparently also had an affair with Sean's father), the best friend becomes the kind of stepmother that makes Snow White seem lucky, Sean's mother becomes a global peace emissary (but not before inviting Sean to leap off a high-rise balcony with her), and Sean becomes a low-key skateboarding hooligan flying over the hills of San Francisco when he's not being bounced between boarding schools. Eventually he ends up at Amity, a therapeutic boarding school straight out of Murakami's Norwegian Wood, only this one is in a 16th-century palazzo in Tuscany; there, among people who take a benevolent interest in him, he begins to slow down. "Thank God there was a place, briefly, where tenderness was possible, in exchange for money," he writes. He finds himself. He makes lifelong friends. He returns to the US and starts digging into his family history and the history of San Francisco. He becomes a writer.
Apart from masterfully capturing a moment in time—San Francisco in the '80s and '90s in particular—this is also memoir-as-revenge, which, if I'm being honest, is my favorite kind, especially if it's done well. This is done well; Sean names names and squeezes juicy details for all they're worth, and if rumors are true that the evil stepmother hired a PR company to do damage control in the wake of its publication—well, that's pretty glorious, isn't it?
I mean, how do you not continue reading? Especially after Sean's wealthy father leaves his mother for her gold-digging best friend, the best friend's ex-husband marries author Danielle Steel (who apparently also had an affair with Sean's father), the best friend becomes the kind of stepmother that makes Snow White seem lucky, Sean's mother becomes a global peace emissary (but not before inviting Sean to leap off a high-rise balcony with her), and Sean becomes a low-key skateboarding hooligan flying over the hills of San Francisco when he's not being bounced between boarding schools. Eventually he ends up at Amity, a therapeutic boarding school straight out of Murakami's Norwegian Wood, only this one is in a 16th-century palazzo in Tuscany; there, among people who take a benevolent interest in him, he begins to slow down. "Thank God there was a place, briefly, where tenderness was possible, in exchange for money," he writes. He finds himself. He makes lifelong friends. He returns to the US and starts digging into his family history and the history of San Francisco. He becomes a writer.
Apart from masterfully capturing a moment in time—San Francisco in the '80s and '90s in particular—this is also memoir-as-revenge, which, if I'm being honest, is my favorite kind, especially if it's done well. This is done well; Sean names names and squeezes juicy details for all they're worth, and if rumors are true that the evil stepmother hired a PR company to do damage control in the wake of its publication—well, that's pretty glorious, isn't it?