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"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were pleased to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exciting tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, & 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 celebrities in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA; an apartment near the top of a building near the top of a hill: packed with light, packed with voices, packed with windows packed with water and bridges and hills." His enigmatic father runs on the jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You need to wash your hands first, before you utilize the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. However your hands are."When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns nine yrs . 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 will require packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on the planet (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might get back to SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA 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 mixture of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, do-it-yourself, 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 from it All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.
