Starred review from April 18, 2022
In this tantalizing blend of personal history and reportage, Washington Post reporter Parks seeks out the story of an enigmatic small-town country singer to reckon with her own fraught past. When, in 2002, Parks’s grandmother shared that she’d once been neighbors in the 1950s with “a woman who lived as a man” named Roy Hudgins, Parks pledged to find out what happened to him. As a college freshman in the South who’d recently faced rejection after coming out to her family—a confession met by a plea from her pastor for “God to kill me”—Parks writes, “I couldn’t believe there was a place where you could be different, and people would love and accept you.” Seven years later, she set off on a series of trips through rural Louisiana to interview people who had known Roy. As Parks uncovers the mystery surrounding Roy’s life and death, she attempts to reconcile her sexuality with the specters of the home she left behind, as well as her complicated relationship with her mother, an opioid addict who was “bright and joyous when she was off the nose spray, vacant and mean when she was on.” Out of this comes a brilliantly rendered and complex portrait of Southern life alongside a tender exploration of queer belonging. Parks’s writing is a marvel to witness.
