A celebrity journalist chronicles his bullying behaviors throughout his Southern youth, his friendships with such figures as Eudora Welty, and the impact of journalist Frank Hain's murder on his career. 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 his memoir, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there."Kevin Sessums is some sort of cockeyed national treasure." -Michael Cunningham Author's Note xi Acknowledgments xii Prologue 3(24) Ross Barnett George Hamilton Arlene Francis Skeeter Davis, Noel Coward, and Eudora Welty 27(13) Stephen Sondheim, Captain Hook, and Dorothy Malone 40(45) Johnny Weissmuller, Margaret Hamilton, and Katherine Anne Porter 85(55) James Brown, Jesus, and Jackie Susann 140(81) Audrey Whatshername 221(8) Pee Wee Reese, Dizzy Dean, and Erik Estrada 229(10) Dusty Springfield, Cloris Leachman, and Miss Diana Ross 239(19) Lewis Carroll, William F. Buckley, and Yvonne De Carlo 258