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LGBTQ Book Club Discussing Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery

In-Person and Virtual Program

Join the LGBTQ Book Club for a hybrid (in-person and online) discussion of Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery by Casey Parks.

This is a hybrid event and will be hosted in-person in the West Hollywood Library Community Meeting Room as well as on WebEx Meetings via the following link:

https://lacountylibrary.webex.com/lacountylibrary/j.php?MTID=mba7b1691835e16da3c49839dae72210b

West Hollywood Library LGBTQ Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of odd-numbered months to discuss literary works of relevance/interest to the LGBTQ community.

Please contact the library to borrow a print copy of the book. eBook and eAudiobook are available through OverDrive/Libby.

Attendance is limited, and advance registration is required for in-person attendees. Please register every individual in your party. This will be used to save your spots in the program. We cannot guarantee availability for any unregistered attendees.

This event is held in-person. LA County Public Health strongly encourages masks and physical distancing indoors regardless of vaccination status. Masks will continue to be available for customers upon request. Please see the Guidelines for Attendees during the registration process for more information.

Summary provided by the publisher:

When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks’s grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks’s life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother’s youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.

For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and 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. 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.

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