基本信息出版社：St. Martin's Press
页码：320 页
出版日期：2007年03月
ISBN：0312341016
条形码：9780312341015
装帧：精装
正文语种：英语
外文书名：密西西比河上的胆小鬼 (小说)

内容简介 在线阅读本书

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.
作者简介 KEVIN SESSUMES is currently a contributing editor at Allure magazine after spending fourteen years at Vanity Fair in that same capacity. Before joining Vanity Fair, he was executive editor for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. His work has also appeared in Elle, Travel + Leisure, Playboy, Out, and Show People magazines. He was born and raised in Mississippi and now lives in New York City.
媒体推荐 Review
“Mississippi Sissy is a book I’ve been waiting for most of my life, though I didn’t fully understand that fact until I read the book. We have, as it turns out, been sorely missing a book by a writer who is equally at home with Flannery O’Connor and Jaqueline Susann; who understands that Eudora Welty and Johnny Weismuller are not only members of the same species but are intricately related; whose wit and insight are up to the highs, lows, and in-betweens that compose life as we know it. Kevin Sessums is some sort of cockeyed national treasure.”—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hours

“Mississippi Sissy is an unforgettable memoir. I think it will strike a strong chord with many, many readers. It’s a far different book than “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” but it cast the same kind of spell over me while I was reading it."—Mark Childress

"What a writer! What honesty! Kevin Sessums seamlessly weaves his heart-breaking, funny, outrageous, can't-put-it-down story. Read it! Read it! Read it! Then read it again."
—Ellen DeGeneres

"Kevin Sessums is a brilliant writer. He is also a courageous one. Mississippi Sissy is beautifully told - hilarious yet harrowing, tragic yet inspiring. This book will deeply touch anyone who has ever felt different, which means every single one of us."—E. Lynn Harris

"The depth of the writing equals the depth of his wounds and yet there is an optimism, a surviving instinct, an honesty and an incredible dignity throughout. This book is very powerful!"—Diane Von Furstenberg

"I could not put Kevin Sessums memoir down. A young, white, gay boy, who grew up in a whirl and survived the injustices of class and prejudice, Sessums lyrically, narrates his escape from this tyranny of southern hate. This is the story of an angel with asbestos skin. Were this fiction, it would be on a par with John Kennedy Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces." –Andre Leon Talley, Editor at Large, Vogue

"Wow! What a book! I was both shocked and moved by it. It is said that an unexamined life is not worth living. Kevin Sessums examines his with wisdom and humor and a true writer's sense of grace. This book will create more than the proverbial buzz. It will cause a sensation."
—David Geffen

"I was so moved by Kevin Sessums's funny, sad evocation of his childhood and teenage years in Mississippi Sissy. His youthful instinct for finding the theatrical, musical, and literary locals who opened his eyes to the outside world that he yearned to know about is wonderfully touching."
—Dominick Dunne

"Mississippi Sissy manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking, often in the same moment. It is a poignant story of innocence and sexuality; tragedy and courage. But it is ultimately a tale of perseverance of the human spirit. Kevin Sessums not only has a great story to tell, he is a great storyteller." –Carole Radziwill

"Gutsy, moving, richly-textured and immensely funny revelation, and a precisely remembered evocation of the southern political and cultural landscape in the 60s and 70s."—Patti Carr Black


编辑推荐 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.


专业书评 From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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.

From AudioFile
Sessums writes and reads his memoir with a passion for words, an active imagination, a life full of material, and the deep, full voice of a storyteller. He has the courage to tell the honest truth whether he's relating incidents of his father's rejection, the experience of being orphaned at age 8, or the inner conflict of growing up homosexual in an eccentric, prejudiced family in the Deep South of the 1950s. Sessums covers his first homosexual experiences graphically, but far more explicit is his confusing mix of emotions. His story is more about Southern culture than coming out; more witty than whiny; and his portraits of Eudora Welty, Frank Hains, and his loving mother are far more memorable than the issues that surround him. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.