Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Sessums Versus Vincent



(image via adlandia)

Kevin Sessums is still incandescent over Norah Vincent's delicious pan of his new book in the New York Times Book Review. He's fumed to The Transom of that coochie-colored weekly, he's gone on in his blog, and now he rages to Musto. Our pal Michael Musto chronicles the best literary catfight of the year thus far: Kevin Sessums versus Norah Vincent. From La Dolce Musto:

"Meanwhile, real-life conflicts have been better than any movie I could dream up. Seeing as I like to kick up some literary trouble, I asked KEVIN SESSUMS, whose Mississippi Sissy memoir is getting good reviews, how he felt about NORAH VINCENT's petulant pan in the Times. (She said he failed to make his personal heartbreaks compelling and he exhibits no voice.) Bingo. 'Well, she's a right-wing lesbian polemicist,' shot back Sessums, 'who doesn't seem to have a lyrical bone in her body. She hates memoirs and, according to some mutual friends (yes, we have mutual friends, believe it or not), hates Southern gothic literature as well. Just my demographic. Plus, she's so myopically Caucasian she never even acknowledges that there are African Americans in my book. It's about race in the South in the 1960s as much as it is a coming-of-age story about a gay boy. But she only focused on the sensational aspects of the story—none of the strands that were about maternal love or the sweet tension of the longing all little gay boys have for female companionship.

"'She seems also to be jealous of the traumas I suffered and to wish she could have suffered a few of them herself in order to be able to explain her obvious anger. And she goes out of her way to ridicule my mentioning that I have a big dick. I mention that I did for a sixth-grader in one paragraph in a book of 305 pages! She obviously doesn't like people with dicks of any size!' I'll stop this right there. I don't want violence!"

15-Love, Sessums.

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