I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir

Kevin Sessums

Feb 2015 · Macmillan + ORM

About this ebook

A New York Times bestseller from an author sharing the darkest moments of his life—and how he found the light again—in this honest and vulnerable memoir.

On his fifty-third birthday, Kevin Sessums woke up in his L.A. hotel room wondering how he would get through his scheduled interview with Hugh Jackman. For years he had interviewed the bright lights: Madonna, Courtney Love, Jessica Lange, and all the other usual suspects; but, Kevin knew that his rapidly unraveling life was as shallow as the hotel's hip furniture and he was hanging on by his fingertips.

In I Left It on the Mountain, Sessums chronicles his early days in NY as an actor, his years working for Andy Warhol at Interview and Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, countless nights of anonymous sex, his HIV Positive diagnosis and his descent into addiction. It's also the chronicle of one man's spiritual redemption found while climbing to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostelo and trudging across the cold, lonely winter beaches of Provincetown. Peopled with the famous like Daniel Radcliffe and Diane Sawyer as well as anonymous companions corporeal and otherwise whom he met while mountain climbing and hiking, I Left It on the Mountain is the story of one man's fall and rebirth, the next moving chapter in Kevin Sessums' extraordinary life that takes him from the high to the low and back again.

"A gay Wild with drugs and sex and a spirituality that shocked even me." —John Waters

"A smart and emotionally rich story, rife with failure, forgiveness, and the yearning for significance." — Los Angeles Review of Books

About the author

KEVIN SESSUMS is Editor-in-Chief of 429 and author of the New York Times bestseller Mississippi Sissy. He was previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Allure. His work has appeared in Elle, Travel + Leisure, Playboy, Out, and Show People. He lives in San Francisco, California.