Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery

Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks is easily the best book I've read this year, and it's a strong contender for being my Best Nonfiction of the Year Period as well. Pretty good for a book I fished out of an ARC pile at work because I thought it might be interesting and then left sitting on my floor for six months.

This is about Parks searching for the truth about Roy, the trans man who lived across the street when her grandma was growing up. Who was he? What was his life like, given how conservative and Christian the area still is? Is there anything to the story about him being kidnapped from his birth family? To the country music career?

But really, it's about coming out and growing into yourself and having parents (and a country) who do show more and don't accept you. It's about poverty and dysfunctional families and pain and trauma. It's about a mother whose life never went right, and a daughter who struggles with not being good enough to make up for it. It's about the power of role-models, of community, and of seeing others like you. It's about love, and it's about the stories we tell.

It's also about the rural, Christian, American South. Parks doesn't shy away from the realities—the racism, the homophobia, the small-town gossip, the poverty, the opioids—but she also writes with love and heart. The people she talks to are people, not caricatures of themselves or included to serve a political agenda, and that's clearly a deliberate choice. There is misgendering, from people who clearly cared deeply for Roy. There is honest, compassionate discussion of what opioid abuse, and child abuse, look like in the day to day. There are no good people, no bad people, just complicated ones.

And really, that's the heart of the book. Life is complicated. People are complicated. The past is complicated. Diary of a Misfit is powerfully, beautifully written; introspective and poignant; and above all, heart-breaking. If that sounds like your jam, you should absolutely read it. (Be mindful of your triggers, but read it.)

Side note: No, the real cover doesn't suck as much as this one, but it's close. I'm hoping they change it for the paperback. show less

2022. Great book about being queer in Louisiana. Poverty and religion and abusing prescription drugs too. A moving story about red state American life. As a lifelong blue stater, it is frankly shocking how the other half lives. It was safe for me to come out in Boston, Mass in 1985, but in the deep South it’s still not safe. I still wish we could read Roy’s journals. I continue to hope they won’t be buried/lost. Thank you Casey for your profound, complex portrayal of so many peoples’ full humanity.

For me this book would have been better if she had indicated it was more about herself than Roy, whose picture is on the cover. I realize she did not know this herself when she began researching his intriguing story and that she was continually frustrated as she came to dead ends. But I was also frustrated as a reader, wanting to find out more about him, and finding her going in circles.

She writes beautifully about the south- both the myriad difficulties, especially of growing up queer, and also the draw toward the strong sense of community there and the visceral environment of home. But to me the book needed tighter editing and a clearer subject and took a lot of patience to read.

Accurate description of the challenge that Southern LGBT folk face as kids.