Butter Spread Over Too Much Bread
Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey

reviewed by Greg Mortimer

You don't have to be the only child of one of San Francisco's wealthiest couples, have your childhood all but ruined by your parents' bitter divorce, and spend years at New England boarding schools to write a great memoir - but it sure does help. Sean Wilsey's Oh the Glory of It All transcends these familiar staples of painful, privileged White Guiltdom and gives us an honest, compulsively readable book that spans just about every emotion you could think of.

"In the beginning we were happy," Wilsey writes. "And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." Sean's mother is comfortably perched atop 1970's Bay Area high society and hosts parties in the family's penthouse apartment, with guests including everyone from Shirley Temple to radical lesbians, Betty Friedan to Black Panthers, and Joan Baez to union leaders. When Sean's father isn't managing the family's fortune (made from a generations-old butter and egg business) he flies around Napa Valley in his helicopter and lectures Sean about his too-bouncy walk and his habit of eating junk food: "There is no better thing you can be in this world than a lover of fruit."

In 1980, when Sean is ten, his adulterous father leaves his mother and marries her best (now ex-best) friend, Dede. Dede, whose avarice and snobbery make her one of the most evil stepmothers in modern nonfiction, alienates Sean from the family: "Sean, don't call me 'Mom' again," she says. "I'm not your mother. You have a mother. Unfortunately for all of us." When Christmas rolls around, Dede gives her two sons (from another marriage) video games for Christmas, while Sean gets sweaters.

So begins the sacrifice of Sean's emotions to his parents' narcissism and the launching of years of constant dislocation. Coming out of severe depression from Dede's coup of her social reign, Sean's mom takes him around the world on a quixotic peace crusade to end the cold war. Back in San Francisco, he shuttles between a Berkeley psychiatrist, his mother's penthouse and his father's mansion, trying to win their love and dreaming of his family's reunification. But his hopes are cut short when he's sent off to a series of boarding schools. The first one, St. Mark's, is full of cruel, spoiled hacks; the second, Woodhall, is a sheltered dumping ground for non-motivated slackers; and the third, Cascade, is a frightening Orwellian institution where even the most mild expression of personality is kept on a tight leash.

It's not until he gets to Amity that Sean begins to save himself. An experimental boarding school housed in a villa in Tuscany, Amity has a reform strategy that "resembled a bone-marrow transplant: making us vulnerable, wiping out resistance, and then replacing everything they determined to be defective," Wilsey writes. "...after three months at the school I was so vulnerable and sincere, so truthful, direct, and open to my emotions that any Elton John song could produce in me ecstatic joy or deep woe - just about simultaneously." Sean's failing grades, his spell in a juvenile detention center, his quest to lose his virginity, the endless pranks he's pulled, his pot smoking, and his plots to escape the campuses of St. Mark's and Cascade—all seem a million miles away from the hills of northern Italy.

The last portion of Wilsey's book follows him to New York, where he pursues a writing career while falling in love with and marrying a woman who works with him in the typing pool at The New Yorker. By this point you've had all the exhausting emotions and dysfunction that you can stomach, but here Oh the Glory of It All takes a turn. In trying to reconnect with his ailing father (from whom securing filial love and approval has been his chief goal in life) Sean decides to write a book about the Wilsey family, which leads him to meditate on the behavioral legacy a family can leave: "The more I found out, the more I broadened the scope of this book," he writes about Oh the Glory of It All. "I kept seeing the parallels between my experiences and the experiences of my parents and grandparents. History repeating itself." It's a history that is no stranger to extremities: his grandparents' survival of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco; his mother's vagabond childhood forfeited to the fire-and-brimstone persona of her father, a traveling preacher; and the self-destructive recklessness of Sean's uncle, his father's older brother.

Wilsey tells his story with a voice so patient that his anger is quietly compounded under the surface of the book's narrative. There are no tirades here, only descriptive recollections or dialogues with the characters that display not only his inflicted pain but a strange, sad sympathy for their petty selfishness. By the end of the book you realize that Wilsey's goal isn't to take down everyone who hurt him, because Wilsey himself has come to a realization that can allow him to forgive, a realization about the humanity of writing: "A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are." In the end, Oh the Glory of It All does what all good memoirs should. It turns our reading of one's private self-discovery from mere entertainment into the privilege of intimacy.