Diary of a Misfit, page 42
TNC, from the moment I picked you out, life has been better. No one loves like you do. Thank you for sharing forts, clothes, Barbie dolls, IHOP pancakes, rap songs, country songs, and so much else. I’m certain you’re the reason I survived most years.
Alicia Fletcher, whole chapters of this book would be missing pieces without your memories. Thank you for talking about Mrs. Allen and demon exorcisms and S.P. and the year the men left base. Thank you for being such a great friend to my mom.
Anna Stein, thank you for saying yes even though I didn’t have the goods. Thank you for making me go back one more time. You are the fastest emailer and coolest agent. I knew, as soon as I talked to you about Dolly Parton, that no one else would do. I’m even more sure now.
Lexy Bloom, thank you for your incisive questions and gentle prodding. I love having a straight editor who adores the Indigo Girls and isn’t afraid to talk about the hard stuff. Thank you for pushing me to dig deeper and write clearer.
Thank you, Kathleen Fridella, for shepherding this book through production and catching every small thing. Thank you, Louise Collazo, for improving my sentences with your deft copyedits and checks.
Sam Freedman, thank you for the beat-downs and beatitudes. Thank you for teaching me that I need a comma before “then,” and thank you for saying, “Don’t act like you don’t have skin in the game.” I’m so proud to be a part of your pantheon of ancestors.
Andrea Elliot, thank you for calling this book a book. Thank you for pushing me to apply for Sam’s class, and thank you for sending me songs and books after my mother died.
Aubree and I mostly paid for the trips to Delhi ourselves, but 207 people gave to a Kickstarter campaign when we were near broke. The Regional Arts and Culture Council also gave us a grant. The Anne McCormick Foundation gave me a scholarship to Columbia, and the Lynton Foundation endowed the Columbia book-writing grant that enabled me to take a month off to write the first chapter. Thank you all, and thank you also to the folks at the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, whose Work-in-Progress Award provided a crucial boost as I finished this book.
Aaron Wong and Erin O’Connor are wonderful filmmakers who agreed to work for free in the early days of this project. Thank y’all for tagging along to a town in the middle of nowhere, and thank you for making such beauty of the place that feels most like home.
Thank you, B. Frayn Masters and Back Fence PDX, for giving me an early stage to work out my feelings about this story.
Marlena Ray, thank you for keeping my arms in working order, and thank you for asking enthusiastic questions for twelve years. You made me feel like this book was worth doing.
Martha Kenney, interim, thank you for helping me write the last few chapters. Thank you for getting me through. The time you gave me is one of the great gifts of my life, and if my grandma were still here, I’m sure she’d say you must be an earthly angel.
I wrote most of this book during the pandemic, which would have been horribly lonely if I hadn’t had Claudia Meza, Ben Herold, and Bethany Barnes texting me nonstop. Thank you, Meza, for all the long, brainy texts no acknowledgments could sum up. Thank you, Ben, for the bookbag full of honey buns and one-dollar bills. Thank you for texting about the NBA’s best jerseys, worst haircuts, and sexiest players. Thank you, Bethany, for your book recommendations, always-right songs, and endless poring over the dramas we lived through.
Thank you to Brian Goldstone, Amanda Darrach, Meg Kissinger, Justin Lynch, and Sage Van Wing, all of whom read early versions of the earliest chapters.
Thank you, Kate B., for believing in me even when I was mumbling scared at Powell’s, 2012. Thank you for saying I’d get the journals. I don’t think I would have persisted if you hadn’t written to ask how it was going. You taught me to be brave and unrelenting, empathetic but not soft. I never do a story without thinking of your words. Stupid Casey. The mess is the story.
Thank you Mitxu, Mike, Nikki, Nick, Patrick, Megan, and all of the kiddos for making me believe in family again. Y’all are healing and hilarious, loving, witty, special. You made me feel like I belonged, and I am so grateful to have spent time in your glow.
Nicole Gilson, ISP, thank you for turning the world to color again.
Hayes Young, B, thank you for teaching me boundaries and vulnerability. Thank you for growing with and toward me, and thank you for always being the family I need.
Lizz Gardner was there for all of the good parts and most of the bad. Penny, you and I are bound for life. Thank you for hashing out the early parts of this book with me. Thank you for New Spaghetti and KYTech and Brad and pomes and The Now Sounds. Thank you for going to Cups with me, February 2002, and thank you for being the keeper of all my giddy secrets. I’m forever your babie, and, babie, you’re mine.
Tali Woodward, thank you for our rambling conversations and lost circles. Thank you for knowing exactly what to send, April 2018. Thank you for talking to me about American cheese and so much else that horrid night. Somehow I knew, that first day in your office, that you were my person, and you’ve shown me over and over again how right I was. Thank you for teaching me to write better sentences. Thank you for hoarding Andes mints and editing this book (eventually!!). You have made so much happen for me. How could one paragraph sum it up?
Bird, wild-brain wanderer, the moment I first saw you was one of the most important events of my life. Maybe I’m dramatic, but the rest of the world dimmed, and there you were, tiny, radiant, a vision of what my life could be. Thank you for daring across my dorm bed. Thank you for Mary Oliver and “The Predatory Wasp.” Thank you, like-minded companion, for fielding my shadow book the lockdown year we spent digging for an Edge. You already know how many of these chapters started as emails to you. Thank you for your (long) beautiful (daily) replies. Thank you for your perfect mixes. I dreamed you were a poem. I love you like Celie loves Shug, like Shane Koyczan says, like the magnets in that Tegan and Sara song. Whatever the mess, I’m so grateful for our space in the stitch. (I’m sorry about the crickets.)
Anna Griffin, how did I luck into a best friend in possession of the world’s best and fastest brain? You read this book first and often, and you answered every editing question, even the dumb ones about single words or errant commas. You know me better than anyone, so you called bullshit when it was right, and you let me pout and protest until I reluctantly agreed that, yes, I hadn’t felt this way or that at just the right narrative moment. You taught me how to slow down and pick scenes, and you’ve improved everything I’ve written since I was twenty-four. You always tell me “you get what you pay for,” but I know you’ve given me an immeasurable amount more than that. Goat videos, Nong’s soup, BAM. Antelope, you do it all. I love you till diapers, till the next life or wherever your heathen gods let you and Big Sexy land.
CFWMDW, our person, P above everything, you were the light at the end of a tunnel I thought would always be dark. You showed me what good can mean. Thank you for being the fan who never doubted me. Thank you for cooking one million good meals. Thank you for moving to “Manhattan” and working at a chest of drawers so I could write this book in silence. You made me laugh. You taught me how to hope. You did the Gilly dance almost every time I asked. La da dee dee, oh…I’m so grateful I got to experience your meticulous edits and wide-open heart. Life with you was so much fun. Somewhere in the great beyond, I’m sure my mother is voting me out for letting you slip away, but I hope that someday, over corn dogs, we can get together on an island in the stream and tell her it all ended OK anyway. You’re my family for life and whatever is after that. Perpetua, P. Esto perpetua.
A Note About the Author
CASEY PARKS is a reporter for The Washington Post who covers gender and family issues. She was previously a staff reporter at the Jackson (Mississippi) Free Press and spent a decade at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the Oxford American, ESPN’s The Undefeated, USA Today, and The Nation. A former Spencer Fellow at Columbia University, Parks was most recently awarded the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for her work on Diary of a Misfit. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Casey Parks, Diary of a Misfit
