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Oh the Glory of It All
By Sean Wilsey
Penguin Press, 482 pages, $36

"They were careless people ..... they smashed up things ..... then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess." That line, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, describes almost every adult we meet in Sean Wilsey's shattering, lucid memoir, Oh the Glory of It All. But Wilsey, the son of a San Francisco millionaire and his society columnist wife, has written a surprisingly warm memoir about what it was like to be raised by careless people, and how he cleaned up the mess they almost made of him.

At first glance, there seems to be no reason to read this book. Another clever equivalent of a Bildungsroman about the spoiled only child of aggressively narcissistic parents? How can the reader identify with a kid dropped off to play by jet helicopter, one piloted by his handsome, adulterous father?

But Wilsey pulls you in, page 1: "In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess."

The first act concerns Wilsey's parents' acrimonious divorce, which at the time was one of the most expensive splits in modern American history, the details luridly splayed across San Francisco's society pages. "This was an eighties prime-time soap opera drama. Except for the pain," he writes.

Here are the rotten details: Wilsey's father, Al, left his mother for a younger woman who was also his mother's best friend, the venally portrayed Dede Traina, in whom his mother, Pat Montandon, naively confided. At the time, the budding socialite Dede was married to John Traina, a shipping magnate. When Dede left John, he married author Danielle Steel, but not before Danielle had a brief affair with Sean's father, Al, just before he finally married Dede. Exhale. That's page 37, classic Danielle Steel material, though Sean Wilsey rinses it through J..D. Salinger's literary sieve.

Wilsey's mother is a whirlwind of contradiction, a woman devoted to her son but emotionally abusive. In the throes of depression, Montandon asks him, at 10, to form a suicide pact, describing how both should jump off the penthouse terrace to avenge her abandonment. Eventually, Montandon recovers and embarks on quixotic global peace missions, trips she continues to this day, her latest stop Beslan to comfort children traumatized by last September's murderous hostage crisis at a Russian school near Chechnya.

Young Sean joined her on those trips at first, meeting Pope John Paul II, Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl and Menachem Begin, among other luminaries. All the while, his fantasy mission was to ask world leaders to come back to San Francisco to convince his father to rejoin the family. Eventually, as Al Wilsey became more consumed by his voracious bride, and his mother's missions took her farther from home, Sean was shipped away like an unwanted toy.

He writes of a lonely journey through a myriad of private schools, each by turns useless and horrific. He escapes from a semi-juvenile detention centre, but after a stupid stunt lobbing fruit off the balcony of his mother's penthouse, he's finally packed off to Italy to reluctantly live in a so-called "therapeutic community" in Tuscany. For four years, Sean wails through self-conscious, primal-scream-type exercises, designed to release anger and express heartbreak, two things he'd never done before. But there he receives attention and guidance (and an inordinate amount of hugs), and graduates a calmer, wiser man.

"Crazy and silly as it all was, thank God there was a place, briefly, where tenderness was possible," he writes, wryly adding, "in exchange for money."

Wilsey's memoir is a testament to the resilience of children, and the fact that money is no insulation against the psychic turmoil damaged adults transfer onto their offspring. It should be noted that Wilsey is an editor at McSweeney's, the Dave Eggers-helmed publishing empire of fictional whimsy and pop-cultural detritus. Say what you will about its sometimes twee, often hyper-verbal output, McSweeney's taps a vein with Generation X because theirs was the first to be raised during the soaring divorce rates of the late 1970s and '80s.

Much of the writing in McSweeney's comes from creative minds who suffered childhoods likely interrupted by despairing adults and their loud concerns. And because the stories are often elliptical, code-like and steeped in trivia, they feel as though they're honed by writers who refuse to grow up, or have never learned how to, unable to let go of the coy trappings of innocence and curiosity.

Still, Wilsey's memoir carries none of the so-called "McSweeney's characteristics." Oh the Glory of It All is clear-eyed, linear and (mostly) pitiless. Divorce can leave children feeling like world-weary soldiers, but a bad one rattles their very cores. Wilsey wanders through the early pages as damaged and angry as an unlucky war vet, suffering the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: aggression, withdrawal, severe depression and, I would suggest, a little-discussed symptom called hypernesia.

Hypernesia is the opposite of amnesia, which can protect the brain from fully absorbing horrid facts. Hypernesia leaves its victims unable to forget anything, a curse for Wilsey the boy, a blessing for Wilsey the writer — but a challenge for his editor, who, frankly, was not up to the task. That's my only quibble in an otherwise ridiculously compelling memoir. There are a few too many details and some frustrating repetition; sometimes Wilsey's memoir is more stew than sauce, but the whole damn thing goes down easy nonetheless.

Lisa Gabriele is the author of the novel Tempting Faith DiNapoli.