Diary of a Misfit, by Casey Parks

⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Memoir and a Mystery

I first spotted Diary of a Misfit at The Strand, and the description stopped me cold. When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian, her conservative Southern family turned their backs on her—her mother practically disowned her, and her pastor literally prayed for her death. Then, in a surprising twist, her grandmother—someone she assumed would react harshly—accepted her and revealed a secret from her own past: as a young woman, she’d lived across the street from a woman who lived as a man. She urged Parks to find out what happened to him.

That challenge sends Parks on a decade-long journey through the rural South in search of Roy Hudgins, a small-town country singer who never fit comfortably into his world. She knocks on doors, sifts through archives, interviews neighbors and caretakers, all while struggling with her own sense of identity and belonging.

At first, I expected a kind of journalistic manhunt, but this is far more memoir than mystery—and that’s to its credit. Parks begins looking for Roy, but what she really uncovers is herself. The book becomes an exploration of how we might better understand our own lives through the stories of others.

Her writing is honest, open, and deeply compassionate. She never turns Roy into a spectacle or a symbol; instead, she treats him—and everyone she encounters—with curiosity and respect. Parks’s willingness to portray herself as vulnerable, uncertain, and at times lost makes the story even more powerful. Everyone here feels fully human: complex, contradictory, and shaped by forces both personal and cultural.

Religion looms large throughout, as it often does in Southern life, but Parks handles it with nuance. She neither vilifies nor glorifies faith; she simply shows how it shapes, wounds, and occasionally redeems. Her portrait of the South itself is equally layered—never condescending, never romanticized. It’s a place of grace and cruelty, love and repression, where kindness can coexist with prejudice. I always had a little trouble relating to books about the south, especially those in which religion plays such a strong part of the story, but that wasn’t a problem here.  Everyone, and everything, is remarkable relatable, a testimony to her writing skills.

Diary of a Misfit is part detective story, part family reckoning, part coming-of-age. It’s about queerness, faith, and what it means to belong in a place that doesn’t always feel very welcoming. It’s also about storytelling itself—the urge to document, to preserve, to understand.

In the end, the real mystery isn’t Roy’s life—it’s how we come to terms with our own. Beautifully written, emotionally generous, and unflinchingly honest, this book lingers long after you’ve closed it. I can’t recommend it enough.