The summer I told my parents I was gay, my whole world turned against me. A campus security guard told me I’d fit in better in hell than in college. My mother wrote me daily emails to say she’d thrown up thinking about me. Even my preacher went before our north Louisiana congregation and asked God to kill me. “Save her and take her,” he prayed. “Before it’s too late.” When my Republican grandmother pulled me toward the kitchen table one afternoon, I figured she’d condemn me, too. Instead, she told me a story. “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man,” she began. “His name was Roy.” The story was light on detail and big on mystery. My grandma told me a woman had kidnapped Roy when he was a little girl named Delois, then forced him to live as a boy. No one knew where Roy came from or how he ended up. “I want you to find out,” she told me. Diary of a Misfit tells the story of the decade I spent trying to unravel the mysteries of Roy’s life, ultimately finding answers to questions I didn’t know I had about my own. I knock on strangers’ doors in rural Louisiana to ask about the man people called “morphodite” or “he-she-it.” I dig through yearbooks, Bibles, and nursing home records. And, with my mother in tow, I search for the three dozen diaries people swear Roy left behind. I eventually find the journals, but both my mother and grandmother are dead by then, leaving behind as many mysteries as Roy did. Part memoir, part investigative reporting, Diary of a Misfit is a family saga about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.

DIARY OF A MISFIT IS OUT NOW ON KNOPF. You can buy it on Amazon, Powells or anywhere else you find books.