Sean Wilsey doesn't get mad. He gets even. The 34-year-old author's first book, the memoir Oh the Glory of it All, features a scathing account of his socialite stepmother, Dede. According to Wilsey, she stole his businessman father from his beloved mother, banished him to boarding schools, spent vast sums on jewels and, worst of all, banned him from eating candy after 5 p.m.

But he doesn't stop there. Two-thirds of the way through the book, he declares that neither of his biological parents ever loved him. His shallow stepbrothers treat him with thinly veiled disgust.

The only people who emerge unscathed are his wife (a good idea) and a handful of friends and teachers. By the time the nearly 500-page book ends, with the author's family in tatters, you can only be impressed by the thorough destruction.

And the witty, keenly observed writing.

Make no mistake: Wilsey has created a vivid remembrance of an exceptional life, from his family's crawl up the ladder of San Francisco society to his eventual redemption at a reform school in Italy. But no detail, no slight escapes his notice. Or ours.

Wilsey's privileged background and his parents' rancorous divorce (it was featured in the National Enquirer) hook the reader from the beginning. The book's early pages have attracted the most media attention, and justly so. The incandescently evil portrait of dad-snatching Dede hangs over the first few chapters like a velvet Elvis painting. Indeed, shortly before the book was released, she threatened legal action against Penguin, the book's publisher. You would too.

Rage seethes underneath Wilsey's words. But he refuses to froth. He sums it up a couple of dozen pages in: "Dad saw Mom, . . . did his wooing, did his marrying, joined San Francisco society, had me, built Mom her dream house, gave her everything she asked for, and then left and took it all with him."

Talk about a burned bridge.

Although lacerating his stepmother is fun, Wilsey eventually relents. The book's second section, an account of Wilsey's bouncing from one boarding school to another, contains some of his most inspired writing. The youthful Sean wants to make friends, be cool and lose his virginity. He does make a few friends, although he doesn't waste time portraying them as full-fledged people. (The book is his memoir, after all.) He accomplishes cool through immersion in the skateboard subculture. He meets girls from other boarding schools, though with difficulty.

What he doesn't do is study or behave himself. He flunks classes. He turns to petty theft. This necessitates the multiple schools, climaxing in a terrifying account of the cult-like Cascade school in Northern California. Wilsey writes: "I could not use the phone. I could not write letters. All conversations with my parents were to be monitored. Mom and Dad had told me nothing, just that the school was year round. And that's what the school wanted. If I'd known the rules I would not have come willingly."

Our resourceful author eventually escapes and finds his redemption in the no-less-bizarre Amity school in Italy. The agenda there, as the author tells it, involves a lot of yelling, crying and listening to songs like "Somewhere Out There." Here we watch the emotionally stunted author come to terms with the world.

Wilsey's travails aren't relatable in the strictest sense -- how many people's parents have the money to send them to four exclusive schools? Yet the general narrative is familiar coming-of-age material. All he wants is complete, unconditional acceptance. Who doesn't?

Memoirs from writers under retirement age have become something of a trend lately, what with Dave Eggers's bestselling A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the self-centered essay collections of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. (Eggers offers a blurb on the book's back cover and has employed Wilsey at his quarterly McSweeney's journal.) The trick of these writers is to spice their recollections with enough absurdity, good humor and disarming sentiment that you forget to ask the obvious: "Why don't you write about someone other than yourself?"

Wilsey fits neatly into the group, though his work distinguishes itself with earnestness and breadth. At the beginning of the book's third section, for example, he intersperses a vividly researched account of the San Francisco earthquake and fires of 1906 with his experiences as a disaffected teen, spiraling toward destruction. Audacious, sure. But it works. He peppers the narrative with letters, old report cards and newspaper clippings. These don't serve as a rhetorical trick. Rather, they suggest just how much this project means to Wilsey and just how much he wants to communicate.

In an interview in the April 11 issue of the New Yorker, Wilsey said as much: "I wrote this because I had to write it, and there was no getting around it. It was the story that I just needed to get out of my way. I'm definitely going to write other things. I want to write about something that has nothing to do with my past."

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