For instance, can Sessums truly lay claim to his boastful reputation as being “known as a writer uninhibited by fame”? He’s interviewed and written about stars, but, as he admits, he remained “outside the frame of fame” and, at best, was a “heightened acquaintance” of his subjects. His self-destructiveness, however, is not an easy sympathy case due to his simultaneously self-pitying and aggrandizing attitude. Desperately searching for closure and an outlet for his grief, he turned to drug use and sexual profligacy. However, despite his professional success and hobnobbing with the cultural elite, the author complains of chronic loneliness. Beginning his career as a journalist at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine before landing at Vanity Fair, Sessums notably covered Michael J. The author follows up his first best-selling memoir about the allure of pop culture growing up in Mississippi by charting the next chapter of his life as a media debutante in New York and the seduction of celebrity that he found all around him. 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.Longtime doyen of celebrity media, Sessums ( Mississippi Sissy, 2007) reflects on how his wild years of partying while working as a journalist left him spiritually vacant.

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. 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. 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.

Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums