Review
From the book jacket: "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 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 movie stars in her marble and glass
penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; 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." His enigmatic father uses a jet
helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper
hygiene in...
Beyond the Book
In the wake of the James Frey debacle any memoir that is remotely
controversial has to be
treated as something of a hot potato, especially one as hot as Wilsey's. His
step-mother, uber-socialite Dede Wilsey, threatened legal action against his
publisher (after excerpts had run in the New York Times and San Francisco
Chronicle) in an attempt to stop publication of the book on the basis that there
were more than 30 "actionably defamatory statements of fact ... which constitute
libel per se" (and that was just in the excerpts!). Penguin went ahead and
published anyway, and I don't think there has been any more talk of legal
action.
Sean's relationship with his step-mother is just one part of this memoir but it
is a defining part and...
