A MEMOIR with a cast of characters including a San Francisco tycoon, a “wicked” socialite stepmother, a vengeful son and the romantic novelist Danielle Steel in a cameo role has gripped American high society.

Oh the Glory of it All by Sean Wilsey, which will be published in Britain later this year, lands in American bookshops this week with endorsements from magazines such as The New Yorker. The bestselling writer Dave Eggers, a friend of the author, calls the book “reckless, brilliant and insane”.

Yet it is not the stylishness of the prose that is setting tongues wagging but the insights into the lives of California’s most privileged inhabitants.

Wilsey, 34, the troubled child of a broken marriage, has turned the tables on his blonde bejewelled stepmother Diane “Dede” Wilsey, an arts patron who sits on the board of the San Francisco ballet and opera. She received the bulk of the $300m (£164m) estate left by her husband Al Wilsey, a food magnate. His son Sean got nothing.

“Your father always told me, ‘You’ll have all the money when I’m gone’,” Wilsey quotes Dede as saying. “Look out for and give consideration to the children and grandchildren and family members that are nice to you. But you don’t owe anything to the ones that aren’t. And I mean not even a Christmas card.”

Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City novels, which are set in San Francisco, said: “I don’t think you can overestimate the size of the mushroom cloud that will appear in Pacific Heights (Dede’s home). There hasn’t been a wicked stepmother like that since Cinderella.”

Dede spoke lightly of the saga last week. She had the perfect use, she said, for the extracts that have appeared in a San Francisco newspaper. “It’s quite comical. I’m saving these chronicles for my puppy’s bathroom, so they’re becoming very valuable to me. Little Twinkle is going to tinkle on this.”

Her lawyer has dropped hints about possible legal action.

Pocketing his father’s money was, in Wilsey’s view, the last in a series of betrayals. His book describes how Dede allegedly insinuated herself into his family as a friend of his mother Pat Montandon, a society columnist and charity fundraiser.

No sooner had Dede become his stepmother than the warmth vanished. “Overnight she went from being my most beloved friend to my most bewildering oppressor,” he writes.

One Christmas, as his father lay ill, she is alleged to have sat coolly pinning $200,000 jewels to her bathrobe.

The adolescent Wilsey remained obsessed with Dede, sometimes having sexual fantasies about her. Montandon has still not forgiven her rival for stealing the affections of her son as well as her husband. “I’m just grateful people are beginning to realise what she (Dede) is,” she said.

Montandon, who runs a charity called Children as the Peacemakers, said last week that when her marriage to Al Wilsey broke up, Dede offered to go on holiday with her to Mexico and “hold her hand”. She had no idea that her friend was hoping to supplant her.

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