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Published Aug 2022
368 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life.
When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother's youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.
For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers' doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy's own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person—what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else's story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.
"In this tantalizing blend of personal history and reportage, Washington Post reporter Parks seeks out the story of an enigmatic small-town country singer to reckon with her own fraught past...brilliantly rendered and complex portrait of Southern life alongside a tender exploration of queer belonging. Parks's writing is a marvel to witness." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Parks' work of self-investigation is a fascinating, engrossing tale about identity and belonging." - Booklist (starred review)
"Less a journey of discovery and more the account of a complicated daughter-mother relationship laden with guilt and neglect." - Library Journal
"A beautifully written and deeply reported epic about what it means to be Southern, what it means to be queer, what it means to belong to a family. Casey Parks is a tender, brilliant storyteller. I was haunted and moved by this account of the different Americas she inhabits." - Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble
"Parks' engrossing book is an excavation—emotional, familial, spiritual, and perhaps above all else, regional. The Louisiana she can't leave behind—and one mysterious inhabitant in particular—haunt her early adulthood as she grapples with what it means to be a daughter, a writer, an outlier, and, in her own way, a believer." - Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply
This information about Diary of a Misfit was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Casey Parks is a reporter for the Washington Post who covers gender and family issues. She was previously a staff reporter at the Jackson Free Press and spent a decade at the Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ+ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and the Nation. A former Spencer Fellow at Columbia University, Parks was most recently awarded the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for her work on Diary of a Misfit. Parks lives in Portland.
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