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Mississippi Sissy
by Kevin Sessums
| List Price: |
$24.95 |
Unavailable for
purchase at this time |
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Hardcover
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Format: Bargain Price
Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins. In a memoir that echoes bestsellers like The Liar's Club, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.
| Customer Reviews: |
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| Foolish choices |
| Customer Rating: 1 out of 5 |
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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.
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| Colorful and Candid |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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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.
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| THIS Mississippi Sissy was not impressed |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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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.
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| Good...not great |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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I read this book at the urging of a friend, and I have to say that I enjoyed it. However, I would not say that it imparted to me any new insights, or startling revelations about gay life, life in the South, child molestation, death, racism, and evangelical religion. Since these things seem to be the main topics of the text, I can't say that it was a truly unique attempt.
Two elements of the text that I as a reader could not reconcile was the ever changing timeline and jumping from point to point. This ever shifting timeline does not normally bother me, if I see how it serves the writing. I did not see that here. Nor did I ever buy the extraordinarily precise memories of a 2 year old. I found some of the details that Sessums gave about that time in his life to be a little self indulgent, and perhaps too flattering.
I know a bit about some of the topics in this memoir, and this text imparted no new light or insight. It was a good book, but not a classic. Sessums skills as a writer are undeniable, but I guess considering the richness of the topics included, I was hoping for a classic.
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| A Memoir from a Child's Stance with the Vocabulary of a Poet |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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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
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