Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #626511 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-06
• Released on: 2007-03-06
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

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.

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.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Even as a very small boy, living in small-town Mississippi in the late 1950s and '60s, Kevin Sessums sensed that he was different. The son of the high school basketball coach "in a friendly hick-filled hamlet in the middle of the state called Pelahatchie," he didn't like sports (though he had "inherited an innate athletic ability from my father"), loved the movies, was infatuated with Arlene Francis (a panelist on the television show "What's My Line?") and was often called "sissy" to the point that, he thought, he was "the sissiest boy in Mississippi."

That was bad. What was worse was that within a year, he lost each of his parents. In 1963, when he was 7, his father was killed in an auto accident at the age of 32; his mother died a year later, at the age of 33, of esophageal cancer. He and his younger brother and sister, Kim and Karole, were reared by their maternal grandparents as well as a host of uncles, aunts and other relatives. They were given plenty of attention and love, but it was never the same as having their own parents, and it had lasting effects on all three of them. As adults, they have thrived -- Karole is deeply involved with the arts in Mississippi, Kim is a physician as well as an artist, and Kevin writes celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair and other glossy magazines -- but the memory of being what the Mississippi newspapers called "The Sessums Orphans" has stayed with them.

Mississippi Sissy is Kevin Sessums's attempt to come to terms with this complex and burdensome legacy. It's a strange book. It vividly recreates Mississippi in the 1960s and '70s, with bitter, brutal racism in the rural areas yet tentative steps toward change and acceptance in Jackson; its portrait of the Mississippi cultural underground is detailed and, so my own limited acquaintance with the phenomenon tells me, accurate; it is candid about Sessums's awakening to his homosexuality and his uncertain attempts to practice it in a place where it was anathema. But it also is filled, just about to overflowing, with dialogue. Though Sessums acknowledges that this narrative is "my own invention," albeit "as true to these people and events and what was said around me as my memory can possibly make it," the reader is likely to feel that there's just too much of it: long talks with his mother and grandmother (some dating to when he was 3 years old), a sermon by a preacher who eventually seduced him, an endless late-night bull session among the Jackson illuminati -- it's just too much, and it seems to cross the line between memoir and fiction.

This may be as good a moment as any to acknowledge that memoir is essentially a creative rather than a reportorial act; inevitably, it involves some degree of conscious or unconscious fictionalizing. The memoirist interprets his or her own life, making choices about what to include and what to omit, when to interpret and when to shun speculation. This can turn the memoirist into something close to a novelist (see, for example, Nabokov's masterly Speak, Memory), but a compact with the reader must be maintained. In the case of Mississippi Sissy, I too often found myself doubting that the author could have recalled conversations in anything close to the detail he sets down, especially those that ostensibly took place when he was very young; this raises suspicions that detract from the book's credibility.

It is in broad terms rather than specific ones that Mississippi Sissy is most convincing. The state really was, in the time of Sessums's boyhood, "a confusing brew of chicanery, malevolence, and kindheartedness." Blacks mostly were treated unspeakably -- Sessums's account of the indignities heaped upon his family's maid is especially poignant -- yet there were moments of understanding and kindness on both sides of the divide, a useful reminder that human beings and the society they inhabit can rarely if ever be summed up in stark generalizations. Sessums's account of the gleeful reaction among white Mississippians to the terrible events of the time -- the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers nearby in Neshoba County, the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. -- is faithful to historical truth. His portrait of the incestuousness and random cruelty of small-town life is also accurate.

That cruelty of one sort or another was frequently visited on a little boy who looked and acted different scarcely comes as a surprise. (I remember being mercilessly teased in the fifth and sixth grades of a small town in Southside Virginia around 1950 because my family had moved from the Northeast and I sounded like a "Yankee.") Small towns can be cruel wherever they may be, but the South in those years was especially isolated, defensive toward outsiders and intolerant of deviation in any form. It's clear that people (his father included) suspected that little Kevin was what used to be called a girly-boy long before he was old enough to find himself more attracted to boys than to girls.

From the beginning, though, he was more comfortable with women than with men, and his sympathies were more readily extended to them. Here, for example, he describes his mother and her friend, the wife of the football coach: "They weren't much more than girls, barely past thirty and stuck in a small Mississippi town with husbands that hadn't taken them out to eat on a Friday night since the men had put the word Coach in front of their names and the two women had to live their lives feigning interest while seated on the backless bleachers of muddy ball fields and half-filled gymnasiums."

His mother told Kevin, "I know people call you a sissy," but she argued that the word written on paper looks "pretty" and that he should stand behind it, and himself. She seems to have been quite a woman -- strong, independent-minded, funny, smart, kind -- and her early death is heartbreaking. As for his father, he was "a sports celebrity of local renown," a basketball star at Mississippi College who'd been drafted by the New York Knicks but forsook them for his home state at his wife's request. If he was bitter about this, he doesn't seem to have dwelled on it, but he looked at his first-born son with doubt and discomfort. He called him a sissy or "you girl." He tried to push Kevin into doing the things boys were expected to do and got angry when he didn't. Yet there were times when his love for the boy showed. It must have been a very confusing relationship, for father and son alike.

Eventually, inspired perhaps by his mother's words, Kevin decided just to be Kevin. One Halloween, he dressed up very fancily as a witch, earning near-universal scorn. He played sports for one year in high school and did well, but "I quit every one of them when I was a sophomore and concentrated on graduating from high school early, especially after I consciously admitted to myself that I was a homosexual, saying the four words silently to myself: 'I am a homosexual.' " He says that he was assaulted by an older man in a movie-theater restroom and that a much older preacher lured him into assignations that he mostly loathed but slightly liked. Not until he got to Millsaps College in Jackson did his sexual life take turns with which he was comfortable, though I wish he'd been a bit less graphic in his accounts of how this came to pass.

It was in Jackson that he encountered the Mississippi underground, homosexual and intellectual, sometimes both at the same time. He was taken under the wing of Frank Hains, the arts editor of the Jackson Daily News, a semi-closeted homosexual who never made a pass at him but introduced him to his close friends Eudora Welty, the writer Charlotte Capers and others who passionately if privately resisted the Mississippi status quo. Hains "was a father figure to me, but it was my mother's absence I was aware of when I was in his presence," and when Hains was savagely murdered in July 1975, it was as great a blow to Sessums as the death of either of his parents.

All in all, a tough start to a man's life, but Sessums seems to have landed squarely on his feet. Too bad that his prose is clunky and his memory suspect because Mississippi Sissy doesn't make as much out of his story as seems to be there.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Foolish choices
Being in therapy is an excellent idea. Sharing therapy is a foolish idea. Dull-usions of writing like Faulkner make for especially bad editorial choices. I hope little Kevin feels better real soon because . . . well, poor thing.

Colorful and Candid
Mississippi Sissy is the story of the openly-gay Kevin Sessum's childhood spent in Mississippi. The writing is never dull and features a cast of colorful southern personalities (most notably Eudora Welty).

Mississippi Sissy didn't reduce me to tears. It didn't connect with me on a basic level, like I think Mr. Sessums was going for. I very much enjoyed reading his story, but did not find myself identifying with it on a personal level.

The tale of growing up gay in Mississippi is undoubtedly one that could fill many volumes. Sessums condenses it into just one, and he does it very well. It is not a particularly moving story (though all the pages inhabitants are engaging), but it is a story worth reading nonetheless. I have nothing but admiration for Mr. Sessums after reading this story; he chooses again and again to be strong rather than choosing to be a victim.

THIS Mississippi Sissy was not impressed
I finished the book and said to myself..."eh". I was underwhelmed as I ended up feeling that I was an outsider when I was expecting to be able to relate as one who is gay and Mississippi born. The story seemed more about impressing those who wrote the glowing forwards for the book with never ending references to authors, plays, and insider thespian references that the vast majority of the reading audience could/would not relate to. I could not relate to Mr. Sessum's plight as he shows nothing of himself as an adult gay man nor does he reflect effectively on what he experienced and what he learned from it. The plot is heavy on childhood and then jumps to a few teenage snippets.

I think the author was more bent on impressing people of his accomplishments and association with Eudora Weltey then with bringing himself in line with his readers. It all came off as a bragging right rather then a true insight on growing up gay in the deep south during the 60s and 70s. I big disappointment for all the fanfare.

I would recommend Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley any day or A Boy Named Phyllis over this one anyday.