Fountaindale Public Library

Diary of a misfit, a memoir and a mystery, Casey Parks

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Diary of a misfit

1268205823

Casey Parks

a memoir and a mystery

When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college 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. She said she "grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," 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 her grandmother's youth, and, ultimately, to confront ghosts of her own. For ten years, Parks traveled to rural Louisiana. She knocked on strangers' doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy's diaries to uncover what Roy was like as a person - what he felt, what he thought, and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. As Parks traces Roy's story, she is forced to reckon with long-buried memories and emotions surrounding her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life

adult