DIARY OF A MISFIT

A remarkable story of lives spent hiding—sometimes in plain sight—in the shadow of bigotry and fear.

In a tale with depths as murky as a bayou's, Parks, a reporter on gender issues for the Washington Post, pursues a lead dropped long ago. As her mother lamented that her daughter’s sexuality would get her kicked out of church in small-town Louisiana, her grandmother quietly remarked, “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man.” The two cases weren’t quite analogous, but Parks runs with the clue “because I believed,” she recounts, “that a good Southern tale might turn my work life around.” It may have done, but it took years for Parks to chase down the story of the girl who, it seems, had been kidnapped as a child and raised as a man called Roy, a story detailed in Roy’s multivolume diary. Some townsfolk attributed the puzzling question of Roy’s gender to accident, some to abuse, some to a poverty that led to her being “too poor to wear dresses,” some to divine accident. Even a more or less sympathetic acquaintance would venture only that Roy was a “morphodite,” which is to say, “Half man, half woman.” Even Roy’s tombstone, recording both male and female names, wasn’t clear on the matter. As for the diary, which Parks eventually found, Roy ponders, among other things, the idea that the body is just a temporary shell. The author sharply recounts the rampant pain, confusion, and prejudice but also effort on the parts of some of those small-town folk to find room for Roy and others who didn’t quite fit in. Along the way, Parks uncovers Southern gothic–worthy secrets on the parts of her family and their community. Instead of finding longed-for definitive answers, she concludes, “I understand now that most of what haunted me before might haunt me forever.”

Journalism becomes literature in this memorable meditation on identity, belonging, and the urge to find understanding.