Sean Wilsey: Oh the Glory of it All

Three things, according to P. G. Wodehouse, are essential for an autobiographer: "an eccentric father, a miserable, misunderstood childhood and a hell of a time at his public school".

Sean Wilsey has all of these — plus a lust-provoking evil stepmother (who threatened to sue for defamation when the book was released) and a scenery-chewing, Mommie Dearest mother. With these compelling if conventional elements, he has created an original, engrossing and thoroughly enjoyable memoir.

Born in 1970 to a butter baron worth tens of millions and a glamour queen with her own TV show, Wilsey's early life was a San Francisco penthouse idyll — family friends included Danielle Steel — until his parents divorced when he was 9. His mother's social pedestal crashed with the deliciously shameful media revelation that she wanted enormous alimony, including US$500 a month ($1930 today) for flowers alone.

But she was desperately grasping, not so much for money as love — she asked Wilsey several times to commit suicide with her, then started a Cold War-era, children-for-world-peace campaign, setting her sights on the Nobel Prize. In the process, she gave Wilsey his favourite childhood memories: meeting the Pope, and getting drunk at a Russian state dinner with a bunch of fellow 12-year-olds.

Meanwhile, his father had married a woman Wilsey adored — only to find that the marriage turned her from Snow White to the Wicked Queen overnight.

Her cruelty towards him was vicious, petty and surprising in its stamina — it ranges from forbidding the young Sean to sit beside the rest of the family at mealtimes (he has two older stepbrothers) to planting jewellery on him —making it look like he was stealing it — to justify sending him to boarding school. He eventually did go to several boarding schools and horror, expulsion and dramatic escapes ensued.

With shades of John Irving, Igby Goes Down and even Chuck Palahniuk, Wilsey's story is so surreal and candid, and his nearest and dearest so over-the-top, the book would be a pageturner even if his writing wasn't so exuberant, conversational and perceptive.

It loses momentum only near the end when Wilsey gives us a sketchy outline of his relationship with his father until Wilsey senior's death when Sean was 31. It may have been better to end the book when he left high school, and let us look forward to a second volume. But this is less a complaint than a call for more; Wilsey tells a great yarn and I gulped down the 479 pages in less than a week.


* Penguin, $35
* Janet McAllister is a canvas writer