Mississippi Sissy

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Grady Harp, August 3, 2008 (view all comments by Grady Harp)
A Memoir from a Child's Stance with the Vocabulary of a Poet

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

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780312341022

Author:

Sessums, Kevin

Publisher:

Picador USA

Subject:

BIO026000

Subject:

Personal Memoirs

Subject:

Editors, Journalists, Publishers

Subject:

Specific Groups - Male Gay Studies

Subject:

Journalists -- United States.

Subject:

Sessums, Kevin

Subject:

Biography - General

Copyright:

2008

Edition Description:

Trade Paper

Publication Date:

20080331

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Grade Level:

General/trade

Language:

English

Pages:

320

Dimensions:

7.87 x 5.95 x 0.835 in