Oh The Glory Of It All

Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmmm... well. I enjoyed some parts of this book. It seemed to take forever to get through the boring stuff at the beginning of the book and get to the part where I couldn't put the book down. The beginning was filled with a lot information that I thought was neither pertinent nor really very interesting. So really, condense the first 150 pages down to ten, make the book 350 pages and it's a five star for me. So what I liked: this guy writes amazingly well. He was funny, and honest and sometimes his story was so heartbreaking, I had tears swimming in my eyes. The guy can really write. Sometimes I had no clue what he was talking about but I could still SEE it. I highly recommend this book with the advice to just "suck it up" and get through those first 150 pages. It's worth it.

Synopsis: 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".

Recommended Reading:
Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine du Plessix Gray
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Running With Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal