I Left It on the Mountain

Starred review from November 24, 2014
In the absorbing follow-up to his bestselling memoir Mississippi Sissy, Sessums brings his fascinating voice to this story of ambition, addiction, and recovery. Sessums chronicles his career as a prominent celebrity writer for Vanity Fair, Interview, and Parade, rubbing elbows with Andy Warhol and interviewing Madonna and Courtney Love before falling into methamphetamine addiction. Interludes throughout the primary narrative detail Sessums’s love of extreme travel: he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and walked the famed El Camino Santiago across Spain. However, his love of other extremes—in sex and drugs—seeps into his sparkling career. After a night of bingeing on meth with a prostitute, he shows up to interview Daniel Radcliffe and asks, “Do you use Keats’s theory of negative capability in your approach to acting, in your approach to life?” Radcliffe answers, “Absolutely! You’ve found me out!” As the cycle of drugs followed by successful interviews continues, it becomes clear that Sessums is treading in dangerous water: the more he is able to function despite his addiction, the worse it becomes. The persistent subtext is that his talent for cover-ups only delays the inevitable rock bottom. And it comes: Sessums, left penniless and hallucinating, gives up his beloved dogs to try getting sober in Provincetown, Mass. Sessums’s beautiful writing carries readers through an extraordinary journey of destitution, hope, and forgiveness, from a childhood in rural Mississippi to New York City and beyond.

December 15, 2014
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.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. Beginning his career as a journalist at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine before landing at Vanity Fair, Sessums notably covered Michael J. Fox, Madonna and Courtney Love. However, despite his professional success and hobnobbing with the cultural elite, the author complains of chronic loneliness. Desperately searching for closure and an outlet for his grief, he turned to drug use and sexual profligacy. His self-destructiveness, however, is not an easy sympathy case due to his simultaneously self-pitying and aggrandizing attitude. 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. There's an undeniable air of self-importance to all memoirs, but Sessums fully exploits this characteristic, inflating his social position for bragging rights while downplaying it to display his manufactured vulnerability. Sessums' likening of a New Year's party as "packed as a well-edited paragraph at The New Yorker" perfectly captures the tone of his narrative: droll and unapologetically smug. He is genuine, though, as he chronicles his descent into drug and sex addiction, not to mention the news that he is HIV positive. Sessums dramatically details hitting bottom, but he prevails, closing the loop on his redemption story-but not without the fortuitous help of his friends. Turns out he wasn't so alone. The author's journey is not without its wisdom but too often relies on anecdotes and cameos to keep it afloat.

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February 15, 2015
Sessums, author of the best-selling Mississippi Sissy (2007), made his living by writing about celebrities, including Madonna, Courtney Love, Jessica Lange, and Diane Sawyer, and this memoir is full of colorful, often fascinating anecdotes about a life lived in the shadow of fame. He writes about his mostly failed attempts as an actor, his years working for famous editors, namely Andy Warhol at Interview and Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, and his too-numerous nights of anonymous sex and drug and alcohol abuse as well as his HIV-positive diagnosis. But this is also a book of redemption. Sessums reports on how he tried to overcome or at least confront his addictions by climbing to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro and walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. He also shares such personal revelations as when, during one of his darker periods, he became aware of how sad I really was, despite the rarefied circles he traveled in. An honest account of an often tortured life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)