Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published in USA
Mar 2007
320 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
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.
Click to the right or left of the sample to turn the page.
(If no book jacket appears in a few seconds, then we don't have an excerpt of this book or your browser is unable to display it)
"A marked detour from the often repetitive coming-out memoir, Sessums's story offers wit and incisive observation." - PW.
"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, author of The Hours.
The information about Mississippi Sissy shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.
A timely novel that explores the human capacity for resiliency and compassion.
About the book
Paris Echo
by Sebastian Faulks
A story of resistance, complicity, and an unlikely, transformative friendship.
Reader Reviews
A Ladder to the Sky
by John Boyne
A seductive, unputdownable psychodrama following one brilliant, ruthless man.
Reader Reviews
Severance by Ling Ma
An offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire that is featured on more than twenty 2018 "Must Read" lists!
Visitors can view some of BookBrowse for free. Full access is for members only.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends books that we believe to be best in class. Books that will whisk you to faraway places and times, that will expand your mind and challenge you -- the kinds of books you just can't wait to tell your friends about.
Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info & giveaways by email.
