.... 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.

... acutely vivid details that will resonate with anyone who’s felt that they don’t fit in... Parks’s facility as a vivid storyteller comes as no surprise. Readers familiar with her work in the and the New York Times Magazine know her as a thoughtful, precise journalist who communicates her characters’ humanity and the stakes of a story through evocative details.

Parks blends memoir with investigative journalism in this story intertwining the past and present in the small town of Delhi, Louisiana.

... a work that’s more speculative than investigative and significantly more tragic than mysterious.

... [a] tantalizing blend of personal history and reportage.

A remarkable story.