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Mississippi Sissy | 
 enlarge | Author: Kevin Sessums
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $7.25
You Save: $6.75 (48%)
New (32) Used (7) from $7.25
Avg. Customer Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 17315
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 0.5 x 0.1
ISBN: 0312341024
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780312341022
ASIN: 0312341024
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: New, Excellent Condition, may have Remainder Mark, Tight Binding, Never Been Read , Immediate Shipping, Email Notification, Professional Service, MILLIONS Served, SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
We're All Sissy's at Heart May 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Arleeene! So damned funny.
I saw this book on a business trip at the airport in Dallas. After two days, the title wore on me and I sought out a bookstore and bought it. Poignant comes to mind. Reverent. Unabashedly true and faithful. As a straight Southern Male, sometimes reading this book was kind of embarrassing, but this was Kevin Sessum's life. He actually lived it, so the least I could do was read it. And it wasn't at all hard to read. There were moments where, on the plane coming home, I laughed out loud. There were other moments where tears were close to the surface. I felt for this little kid sissy and all he had to go through. This book reminded me of Crazy in Alabama in places...which is a good thing.
There are some slow points in the book, but I forgive the author his need to talk about some things. For as sure as the biy was a Sissy, the author was preparing us for some additional whacked out scene in which his childhood self was juxtaposed against the racist and stoic South of the 1960s.
 The cover photo is the only interesting thing in this book May 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was passed along to me with a warning that it wasn't very good - and I have to agree. Poor writing (seems half the book consists of annoying run-on sentences), poor narrative (it jumps around in time so much that you never know how old he is in any given chapter), and it was a chore to finish.
Half the book is 'oh, pity me' and the other is 'see how fabulous I am?'
Just wasn't that impressed March 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was looking foreward to reading this book, but frankly was disappointed. It all seemed a bit manufactured, as if somebody was repeating a story they had once heard their friend tell after he heard it from his grandmother. Perhaps the author is too far removed from the events. The book wasn't terrible, it was just one of the few books where it never once occured to me to lend it out to a friend.
Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er Poi-ti-er March 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I remember reading a New York Times review of this memoir and thinking, I'll wait for the paperback. After reading it (in paperback), I went back and reread the Times review, written by a lesbian who wrote a book about going out in drag as a man. She claimed this experience gave her a unique insight into what it's like to be an effeminate man. Mean-spirited and a scathing denouncement, the review was the talk of the literary world for a while.
I found Mississippi Sissy to be almost the exact opposite of how she described it.
The thing that astonishes me is how she dismisses a cocktail party attended by Eudora Welty and a bunch of friends one evening. She said the passage contained nothing memorable enough to repeat. Then of course the dastardly reviewer went on to reveal every important revelation in the book.
(I wonder how many hardcover sales were torpedoed by that review?)
For me, the description of that cocktail party alone was worth the price of this book! The dialogue going on that night, the good humor and joy in that house just before the tragedy of events that befell the host of that party is the Zenith of this book. I felt like Kevin Sessums handed me a snifter of good brandy and sat me in the corner of the room. This passage, which goes on for pages, is one of the most comical, witty, ironic, musical, blissful scenes of "drunk talk" in recent, or even late, memory.
This is a dramatic life. A life of pain and promise. Of tenderness and terror. And then more pain to top it all off.
Sessums gets it just right at every turn. The surrounding Ole Miss bigotry is quite offensive and there don't seem to be too many white adults who challenge it, only a black maid who cuts young Kevin off when she catches him using the N word. This "leaving" is only one of many tragic lessons he learns.
All his dialogue, which he admits he has recreated since he didn't carry a recorder around with him at seven years of age, rings true. And Matty May, the maid who loved him and whose heart he broke, is rendered beautifully. And mysteriously.
Sessums believes in synchronicity. And the interplay between the two sets up a telepathic relationship seemingly born out of the trauma of watching his mother die so shortly after his father.
He feels empathy for the blacks still enslaved by Jim Crow laws and Matty May has imparted some wisdom to help him keep the dignity of his own "otherness" as well. Poitier. Poiiter. Poitier
Kevin Sessums poured his heart into this book and it shows on every page. Mississippi Sissy is beautifully written and I could not put it down.
One man's difficult but often rewarding journey January 24, 2008
"Mississippi Sissy" is a moving and often intense memoir, laced with an air of poetry and theatrical drama, about an artistic, sensitive boy growing up in a rough-and-tumble, and not exactly open minded, Mississippi of the 1950's and 60's. The subject realizing early on that he was gay added further conflict to the mix.
I listened to the 5-CD audiobook version of "Mississippi Sissy", excellently read by author Kevin Sessums. Mr. Sessums reads his memoir like a skilled actor performing a one-man show: he knows when to be light and funny, when to underplay and let the material's impact speak for itself, and when to turn on the no-holds-barred drama.
My only quibble is that the audiobook is needlessly abridged. I've seen "Mississippi Sissy" on bookstore shelves and it's not a huge book. I'm sure an unabridged audiobook would have come in at 7 or 8 CDs, only a little longer than the 5 CDs of this abridged production. The abridgement isn't a deal killer- Mr. Sessums' performance is so good that one would be a cad not to recommend this production to those who enjoy audiobooks- but one can't help but wonder which anecdotes and stories in the print version ended up on the cutting room floor when this audio was produced.
Mr. Sessums memoir concludes with his arrival in New York, still as a very young man, to seek his professional fortune and find his place in life. I hope a follow-up memoir eventually appears, so we can experience the subsequent challenges, developments, and opportunities of Mr. Sessums' very interesting life.
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