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Chargement... Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mysterypar Casey Parks
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. 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. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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"When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the rural South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks' grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, shared a story about her childhood friend, Roy Hudgins, a musician who was allegedly kidnapped as a baby and was "a woman who lived as a man." "Find out what happened to Roy," Casey's grandma implored. Part memoir, part investigative reporting, Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks' life-changing journey to unravel the mysteries of Roy's life, all the while confronting ghosts of her own. For ten years, Parks knocked on strangers' doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy's own diaries, trying 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, Parks 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. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else's story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us"-- Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)306.76Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love Sexual orientation, gender identityClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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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 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. ( )