NONFICTION
Casey Parks’s “Diary of a Misfit” pieces together the elusive history of a Louisiana musician who spent all his life in a community that misgendered him.
Credit…Ana Miminoshvili
By Michelle Hart
- Aug. 20, 2022 (NYTimes.com)
DIARY OF A MISFIT: A Memoir and a Mystery, by Casey Parks
There was the elementary school gym teacher rumored to have been in a lesbian relationship with the woman who taught science. There was the hair stylist who flicked his wrist when he spoke and only half-hid hints of his nightlife in drag. There was the androgynous ticket-taker at the art museum who gave back a knowing glance, the softball player, the tween poet and painter. There was Matthew Shepard.
Figures like these frequently populate (and sometimes haunt) the childhoods of L.G.B.T.Q. people, our first brushes with queerness, those “Ring of Keys” moments when we recognized the obfuscated parts of ourselves in someone else. These individuals make up a kind of constructed mythology for us; our own stories are so often an assemblage of the tales — cautionary and celebratory — that came before. They’re embodied intimations of who we could become.
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery
by Casey Parks
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.
(Goodreads.com)