Mississippi Sissy [Paperback]

Kevin Sessums (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2008

Mississippi Sissy is destined to become an American classic

 

In a book that echoes the time-honored fiction of Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor and memoirs by Mary Karr and Augusten Burroughs, Kevin Sessums brings the American South and the experiences of a strange little Mississippi boy to life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This lovely, engaging memoir by acclaimed entertainment writer Sessums is not so much a gay coming-out story (although its author does discover and act upon his homosexuality) as an investigation of the effects of popular culture on a young, white boy growing up in the racist South in the 1950s. Sessums, who has written for Vanity Fair, Interview and Allure, was born in 1956 and raised outside of Jackson, Miss., by loving parents (although his father wished him to be less effeminate) both of whom died before his 10th birthday. But the heart of Sessums's memoir is how Hollywood and Broadway stars were obsessions and guide posts to a different life, and how female icons (such as Dusty Springfield and Audrey Hepburn) were important role models as he became part of a gay community. At times the prose can be preeningly literary as when Sessums describes his mother and her friends as "they carefully rubbed Coppertone suntan lotion on their smooth and lovely backs, their jutting shoulder blades like the nubs of de-winged angels grubbing around down here on earth." But at other times he can be emotionally shocking and precise as when recalling how, at 16, he hears his older friend Frank Hains tell a delighted Eudora Welty about his affairs with "young African-Americans." A marked detour from the often repetitive coming-out memoir, Sessums's story offers wit and incisive observation. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Sessums, a journalist who specializes in celebrity interviews, describes and analyzes his own childhood and youth, writing candidly of both sexual orientation and race relations in the '60s and early '70s. As a toddler, he swished and posed instead of responding to his basketball coach father's expectation of masculinity. His mother was more broad-minded. However, both parents were dead by the time he was nine, and he and two younger siblings were reared by their maternal grandparents. Small-town Mississippi during the third quarter of the 20th century was less hostile to the young gay boy than outsiders might imagine. Sessums recalls his grandmother's willingness to call him Arlene, in honor of television personality Arlene Francis; his sixth-grade teacher allowed his book report to be on Jacqueline Susann's best-selling Valley of the Dolls; there was even a local gay bar, which Sessums began visiting at 16. However, life provided great and certain bad times as well: the author recalls a sexual assault by a stranger when he was not yet a teen, and another by a preacher a couple of years later. Most harrowing is the event that frames the narrative, the murder of his mentor, and 19-year-old Sessums's discovery of the bludgeoned body. Whether gay or straight, readers will relate to the author's youthful awareness that self-certainty and terrifying uncertainty seem to be inextricably bound. His observations on—and, more importantly, his experiences of—race relations engage and reveal, and remind readers of the complexity of social status.—Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Picador (March 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312341024
• ISBN-13: 978-0312341022
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #581,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs > Gay

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing Up as an Outsider, March 6, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mississippi Sissy (Hardcover)

A correspondent typed to me a couple of weeks ago, "Hello in Mississippi!" and then remarked how much fun the word was to type. It is also a fun word to say, especially if (unlike many of the natives) you pronounce all four syllables. For an arresting title of his new memoir, Kevin Sessums has paired it with another evocative word to make the tongue-twister, _Mississippi Sissy_ (St. Martin's Press), emphasizing the two themes in the book. Sessums grew up in Mississippi in the 1960s, and remembers and relates much of the local color of a distinctive place and time. He also grew up from an early age knowing he was different; before he knew what homosexuals were, he knew he was girlish and liked wearing girls' clothes. There were inevitable conflicts in the conservative atmosphere of his little town of Forest, made worse by his own personal tragedies and losses. There is little trace of self-pity here, though. Sessums has a flair for colorful reporting, and uses thoughtful prose to tell his own story of self-understanding, while gently refraining from condemnation of even the darker characters in the book. He admits that the dialogue he reports has to be his own invention, as best as his memory allows. "I was not carrying around a recording device when growing up in Mississippi. But what I did have, even then, was my writer's ear. I listened. That's what most sissies do when we are children: We sit apart and listen."

He could listen to his parents in his earliest years only. His father was everything a good old macho boy could be, a basketball coach who was a loving bully to his family. "You girl," Kevin would goad the father into saying. "You goddamn girl." Among the few times Kevin made his father happy was when he got into trouble for playing doctor with a tomboy neighbor: "My father scowled at me before breaking out in exaggerated laughter, 'Way to go, Kevinator! Maybe there's hope for you yet!" Kevin was much closer to his mother, who encouraged his cross dressing as something "right cute" when he was little. His aunt Vena Mae objected during a dress-making session, when Kevin was not yet four, "He's not right _nothin'_." The father reacts with violence when he finds out about the dress, and probably the family violence would have escalated if he had not died in a car crash when Kevin was seven. Kevin's mother was only to live one year thereafter, succumbing to cancer. It was she who shared a playful camaraderie with the boy, not only encouraging dressing up but sharing private jokes with him, and a love of words and of language and literature. Along with a peculiar upbringing, Sessums grew up in a peculiar place and time, and his descriptions of how he came to understand racial matters are poignant. He remembers only two teachers who shed tears over Kennedy's assassination, and one of them tried to change things for her students. "Some of your parents will tell you bad things about the civil rights movement," she instructs. "But the civil rights movement is not bad. It is how we choose to react to it that can be bad. Don't be bad, children. Mississippi is already full of enough badness." She didn't know that an uncle of Sessums, informed of Robert Kennedy's assassination (after that of President Kennedy and of Martin Luther King), roused himself to say, "We're gettin' 'em all. Them Yankees may have whupped us back yonder all them years ago, but we showin' 'em now."

The ugliness is on a par with the scenes of young Kevin being sexually abused by the fundamentalist minister the family admired, or by a stranger in a theater. Kevin left Forest for the big city of Jackson, where he did have a girlfriend and the requisite pregnancy scare, but where he also came to terms with his homosexuality and was unrepentant about it. During college, he worked in the local theater group, which got him associated with a local literary lion, Frank Hains, a newspaper editor and theater booster. Hains was Kevin's introduction to Eudora Welty, and included here are Sessums's recollections of the cerebral cocktail-party chatter in which Miss Welty would happily join, as well as his becoming her designated driver for a trip home. The book ends with the ritual gay-bashing murder of Hains; it was Sessums who discovered the body. Sessums was not long for Mississippi; he lives far away now, in New York City, where he has been a contributor and contributing editor to many magazines. Harrowing and funny, his memoir represents a literate coming to terms by a kid, and an author, who, in multiple ways, simply did not fit in.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Memoir from a Child's Stance with the Vocabulary of a Poet, August 3, 2008

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mississippi Sissy (Paperback)

MISSISSIPPI SISSY by Kevin Sessums has been a successful best seller since the journalist entered the realm of novelist in 2007. The reason for the extended readership of this coming of age story of a gay male in the 1970s South may puzzle some, but read a few chapters and the reason is clear: this is hilarious, sensitive, perceptive, colloquial writing at its best with the added attribute that Sessums' writing style is as eloquent as those writers he admired as a child - EM Forster, Flannery 'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, WH Auden, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty.

Sessums writes with candor about the racism he witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s, but his viewpoint is equally distributed between the gnarly vindictive vantage of his father and other white adults and the gentle love he worshiped in his closeness to his African American caretakers and colleagues. Orphaned at age 8 with his father's death in an automobile accident and his mother's subsequent death from cancer, Sessums was allowed more leeway with his propensity to dress and act like a 'sissy' and eventually came into his own sexuality both by exposure to a Pedophilic evangelist and his own exploration of gay bars and satisfying encounters with surprising partners (his first real love was a champion athlete who just happened to be African American!).

And while every page of this beautifully rendered memoir is full of elegant prose describing such issues as Southerner response to civil rights, the murder of JFK and MLK, Jr., participation in the lives of famous writers by way of his close friend Frank Hains, a journalist who molded Sessums in many ways, the author shares many of the idols of television ('What's My Line?' cast) and movies (Audrey Hepburn, etc) and other icons of the times of his maturing, giving the reader a memory book that goes far beyond simply a true personal memoir. Love, death, abuse, disease, racism, and dreams for a life of understanding blend on nearly every page. This is a book that is likely to become a classic and deserves all the weeks it spent on the national Best Seller Lists. It is just 'swell'! Grady Harp, August 08

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Courageous and Moving Memoir, March 6, 2007

By 

Bluestalking Reader "Bluestalking Reader" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Mississippi Sissy (Hardcover)

Kevin Sessums's memoir Mississippi Sissy was one of an armload of review books the Holtzbrinck group sent me recently. In that pile of general and genre fiction, this one leapt out at me immediately. Not only was it the only work of nonfiction in the box, but it's not everyday you see a title with Mississippi in the title, much less one with as engaging a word as "sissy" to go with it. It gets the attention, it really does.

Just a catchy title isn't enough, of course, if the book itself doesn't engage. In this case the style engaged me immediately, and the authentic Mississippi voice was one I could identify with, coming from that state myself.

Sessum's book tells the story of growing up gay in 1960s Mississippi. It may take a moment for the immensity of that to hit home, but considering this is KKK territory you may rest assured this was one rough ride. Mississippi isn't exactly a state noted for being liberal, nor especially tolerant of anyone the slightest bit "different." It was a rough ride made worse by Sessum's uber-macho father, whose disappointment with his son played a major role in his growing up. Imagine being everything your father despises, yet wanting so badly to be a good son and make him proud. The difficulty of his childhood is painful and poignant, and Sessum reacts by shutting down his emotions, in an attempt not to embarrass his father further.

In contrast, his mother thought his cross-dressing cute and funny, at least until her husband began reacting more violently. If Sessum's father hadn't been killed in a car accident the violence and anger would surely have escalated.

Closely following his father's death his mother also died from cancer, leaving the boy orphaned from a young age. With his mother Kevin had enjoyed a much closer relationship. She gave him the feeling of being loved and wanted, and there was also a certain playful camaraderie between them. They shared secrets, as well as private jokes. Her death left Kevin adrift, disconnected from his immediate family.

Mississippi Sissy is a courageous, warm, and often poignant memoir of what it is to be different from the mainstream in an unforgiving environment. It's also a testament to Kevin Sessum's spirit that he was able to weather it all and go on to become a writer known for his celebrity interviews. He's an interviewer celebrities seem to trust implicitly, and there's a quality to his writing in his memoir that may give the reader a good idea why that is. He has a genuineness, as well as an unforced honesty, that lends an especially compelling quality to his writing. I'd recommend Mississippi Sissy without hesitation as a truly well-written memoir.