Oh the Glory of It All

'in the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.' With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families. Sean's blonde-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters from Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City) regularly entertains 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. With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations - sex, the 80s, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, the misery of boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, the joy of skateboarding, massage, the lives of itinerant ministers in Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation - Oh the Glory of it All is memoir as Bildungsroman as explosion.