Kevin Sessums is the author of the new memoir I Left It On the Mountain. His other work includes the memoir Mississippi Sissy. He is the editor in chief of FourTwoNine magazine and dot429.com, and was a contributing writer for Vanity Fair, Allure, and Parade. He lives in San Francisco.
Q: This is your second memoir. Was your writing process
similar this time, and did writing this memoir evoke similar emotions for you?
A: These are very different memoirs. The first one was more
novelistic in its way because I had such distance from that child and that
teenager that they became rather like characters in my own story.
What is it that Marianne Moore said about poetry - imaginary
gardens with real toads in them. That memoir was the reverse - a real garden
with imaginary toads. I was the toad. That memoir was my kiss upon my own head.
I didn't become a prince. But I did cease to be a toad by telling my story. I
became the author of it.
This new memoir was a way to save my life. I looked around
while I was still an active addict and realized that the only way I was going
to save myself was to be my truest self and that was writer. I am a writer even
before I am an addict. So I wrote the narrative of becoming sober and became
it.
There is a saying in the 12-step program to which I belong and
that if you have to, then act "as if." So much of writing this new
memoir was writing "as if" until "as if" became the
truth.
Q: Much of this book focuses on your struggles with drug use
and your eventual sobriety. What finally caused you to get sober and stay
sober?
A: Grace.
Q: You’ve worked in celebrity journalism for many years.
What do you see as the biggest changes in the field, and are there ways in
which it’s remained the same?
A: We once spent a
lot of time with a subject in order to write a piece about them. My cover
stories in Vanity Fair were sometimes five to six thousand words. A real
narrative could be shaped. Now you're lucky to be assigned 1,500 words and to
get an hour with someone between a bowel movement and a Botox injection.
I think social media has helped morph this part of the
media. Celebrity is no longer celebrated with a five thousand cover story in
Vanity Fair. It's attained now on Facebook or Youtube or calling yourself a
"housewife" and living in a designated city.
Q: Your book’s title also appears in a chapter in the book
about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. What does the title signify for you, and why
did you choose it?
A: I don't want to give away what I left on the mountain. I
think readers should discover that for themselves. I hope everyone goes
and finds their own mountains to climb and if they leave something of their own
there, that's what is important - not what I left there finally. With a memoir,
I think what is important finally is not the life that is written about but
that it inspire the reader to think about his or her own life.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am beginning to write a theatrical version of
Mississippi Sissy for New York Theatre Workshop. I plan to be in it at this
point. Stay tuned.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I'm a SF Giants fan. Dark chocolate is my new drug of
choice. I am currently reading John Williams's brilliant novel Stoner. I'm
single.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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