Kevin Sessums Sees His Book's Most Negative Review As An Endorsement

Kevin Sessums Sees His Book's Most Negative Review As An Endorsement

Former Vanity Fair editor Kevin Sessums details his years of celebrity hobnobbing, drug abuse and promiscuous sex in his new memoir I Left It On The Mountain, and while this makes for a riveting read to some, others have been less than enthused.

"It's a difficult book for people to sort of grasp on to," Sessums told HuffPost Live's Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani on Thursday. "It's about celebrity, it's about spirituality, there is sex in it, ... I don't bullshit people, and I'm maybe too open at times, as this book proves. I can be vulgarly open -- not vulgar in the sense of sex, but vulgar as in just too much."

One reader in particular seemed to agree. A scathing user-generated review on Amazon.com lambasted, among other things, the text's "off-putting sex scenes." That didn't upset the FourTwoNine magazine editor-in-chief much, though.

"The worst review is the only one that made me want to read my own book!" he recalled. The veteran journalist had the review on hand and proceeded to read it on HuffPost Live -- in a southern accent -- which you can see at 3:14 in the video above.

"This person gets the book, and yet doesn't get the book," he said. "[But] that's the first thing that made me want to read my damn book and it was a bad review! So you can turn things on their head, I think."

Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!

Before You Go

Leaving the Pink HouseBy Ladette Randolph

In this memoir, Ladette Randolph and her husband, Noel, sell their rustic-chic house in Lincoln, Nebraska in order to move to a derelict farm in the country outside of town. Since they've taken a bridge loan, the couple must complete the renovation of the new house within nine months, and the story is organized around the process of redoing roofs, and finding kitchen cabinets, as the clock ticks down and contracting mishaps multiply. But it's a misleadingly lighthearted structure, because, as Randolph redoes her new home, she looks back on her many past ones, revealing powerful events with an understated elegance that only makes them more powerful. These include: her survival from a rare blood cancer in her 20s, her departure from the fundamental Christian church in which she was raised and her horrific divorce during which her 5-year-old daughter was forced by a judge to choose between parents -- and could not. Leaving the Pink House is one of those books that helps you realize the enormity of the so-called average human experience. "This is the story of my life," writes Randolph about the night she decides to leave her narcissistic husband during a cancer treatment, but then is discouraged by a nurse, "moments of crystalline perception followed by a sluggish indecision and an eager willingness to talk myself out of my own best interest." It's a feeling we've all had at least once in our lives. But for this writer, in this memoir, that crystalline perception appears to have returned to reside permanently on the page.-- Leigh Newman
By Diogo Mainardi

Told in 424 short passages -- a number that corresponds to the number of painful, slow steps that it takes Diogo Mainardi's disabled son Tito to walk from their apartment in Venice to the hospital that bungled his young birth -- this slim memoir astonishes with its raw honesty. As he examines his child's cerebral palsy, the author lays bare his guilt over his past flippant remarks about birth deformities, his fury over the negligence of the doctors and his unexpected and dizzying adoration for Tito, which leads him to move his family from Italy to Brazil so that Tito can walk without fear of falling on the soft sand of Rio's beaches. Along the way, expect discourses on Italian art history, the poems of Ezra Pound and the songs of Neil Young (whose two kids also have cerebral palsy). A heartbreaking, brain-expanding hymn of love by a father for his son.-- Leigh Newman
By Vinh Chung

"I was born in a country that no longer exists and grew up in a country that I never knew existed," writes Vinh Chung about his journey from Vietnam -- via boat and extraordinary hardship -- to the U.S. Yes, this is a riveting story that covers everything from surviving visits from machete-carrying Khmer Rouge guerrillas to burning stacks of devalued money to keep warm. But it's also a story about human kindness -- the sort that inspires a stranger in San Francisco to slip a hundred dollar bill into a father's shirt, enabling him to buy groceries. Powerfully told, and unforgettable.-- Leigh Newman
By Gail Gutradt

A wrenching memoir of the time Gail Gutradt spent volunteering at Wat Opot, a residence for Cambodian children and teens living with HIV and AIDS.-- Sarah Meyer
By Gail Sheehy

Trailblazer Gail Sheehy's memoir spans some 70 years, from her childhood to her modest beginnings working at JCPenney to her rise to the highest rungs of journalism. She broke ground reporting on maternity clinics, prostitution and feminism and helped millions navigate life's seasons with her landmark work, Passages. Here, she looks back on her remarkable life with unflinching candor.-- Sarah Meyer
Close

What's Hot