Oh the glory of it all
By: Sean Wilsey.
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 482
Subjects: Wilsey, Sean -- Childhood and youth; Montandon, Pat; Wilsey, Al; Children of divorced parents -- California -- San Francisco -- Biography; Children of celebrities -- California -- San Francisco -- Biography; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: Sean Wilsey takes us on a tour his 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 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, his father now in the clutches of a fairy-tale-worthy stepmother, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, until he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy.