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63
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
60/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Casey Parks
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
August 30, 2022
Part memoir, part 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.
What The Reviewers Say
.... at once dewy-eyed and diligent, capricious and capacious, empathetic and exacting. It’s as richly textured as a pot of gumbo. As a work of autobiography, it’s maximalist; subtitled A Memoir and a Mystery, it certainly is both of those things, but it’s also an assiduous family history, a decades-spanning community chronicle à la Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, a coming-out narrative, a dive into Christian denominations, a wrestling with Southern heritage. To use a well-worn road metaphor, your mileage may vary.
You can't look away from the riveting opening sentence of Casey Parks' spellbinding Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir. It draws you quickly in to her atmospheric tale of self-discovery after coming out as a lesbian to her mother in her small Louisiana town.
Putting down this wonderfully sensitive, affecting memoir, I half expected to see wavy fumes — smelling of tobacco, crawfish, beer, rain — rising from the book itself.
As [Park] strives to become a better journalist and continues pursuing information about Roy over the course of more than a decade, she begins to face her own past, too, from the heartbreak of losing church once she came out to her tumultuous and complex relationship with her mother. She does so with remarkable empathy for her family members, Roy's acquaintances (even those who abandoned him in his later years), and her own younger self.
