He just did not start from his birth and end as an adult or death in case of most of the memoirs around. There is a nice engaging and interesting intro, clear characterizations, well-developed characters, interesting build up to a satisfactory climax and finally the denouement. Unlike those earlier books that a mentioned above, Sessums followed the standard way of telling a novel. I like that: I'd be the judge and he does not care.ģ. He just told his story and it is up to you to react. Sessums does not care whether you love or hate him. That transparency is also built in the narration. Even its title screams that this is about a sissy. This book by Sessums is more transparent. My edition of those Burroughs books, for example, did not mention anything on their covers that they were about gay boy/man. The book did not try to conceal the fact that it is about a gay person. If this were a movie and I was one of the Oscar jurors, I would definitely nominate this for Best Editing.

It is like watching a horrendous scene and then some scenes that happened when he was a boy were quickly flashed on the screen for added shock and further heightened the emotion. Then when he grew up and experienced all those abuse, rape, death, etc as an adult, in each of those painful events, he interspersed those boyhood scenes earlier told and revealed those previously-withheld details. However, he withheld some of the details or information. Sessums first told his stories clearly when he was young. Maybe my mind is now open to this kind of subject but I think it is more because of these three reasons: 1. This book, 'Mississippi Sissy' by Sessums even went a lot further vividly describing those masturbation, rape, and sex scenes, but I did not feel any apathy against the book nor the author. I used to abhor memoirs with explicit and detailed sexual encounters so I gave that Burroughs book with 1 star (Too much sex I did not like it!). Looks like a typical gay boyhood memoir, right? Well, prior to this, I read America's Boy: A Memoir (2 stars) by Wade Rouse, A Boy's Own Story (3 stars) by Edmund White, and Running with Scissors (2 stars) and A Wolf at the Table (1 star) by Augusten Burroughs. He shared everything including the emotional and physical tortures that he suffered from the hands of his father who could not accept him as gay, the sexual abuse and rape that he experienced at his young age and the many other homosexual encounters that he had with his lovers. I did not have any idea who Sessums was and after reading this book, I felt that he was like a friend to me.

Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums