I read two books this weekend/week, both memoirs about adolescence in America. I couldn't put down Oh the Glory of it All, which is sad and funny and beautifully written in the cleverly self-conscious and ironic style that I think I first loved in Dave Eggers' memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis and his first novel, You Shall Know our Velocity. And it does indeed turn out that Sean Wilsey, the author of Oh the Glory, is an editor at large at McSweeney's Quarterly, and Dave Eggers wrote a blurb for the back cover. Small writing world?!?
Oh the Glory is another piece in an unsolvable puzzle about why some kids make it through adolescence and some kids don't. Some of the most disheartening parts of the book are about him being shuttled from one boarding school to another until he fortunately gets to one where the people treat him like a person. It's nice that Sean Wilsey made it down the long road out of his family and into the comparatively sane world of adulthood and wrote this book.
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