(bell dings) (typewriter slides) (soft music) - I'm Casey Parks, and this is "Diary of a Misfit".

Sometimes I just say it's a fruit salad of Southern issues because there's opioid addiction, there's religious stuff, there's gender identity, there's sexuality, there's poverty.

- Tell us about Roy, and tell us how you started investigating who he was.

- My grandma, just like outta nowhere said, "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man."

And this, I mean, this was 2002.

There was no Caitlyn Jenner.

There was no Laverne Cox.

And it just rocked my world when she told me that.

But she'd lost touch with him, and so she wanted me to go track him down.

And initially, when people would talk to me about him, they all said the same really basic things.

They said he mowed lawns for a living, he played music, and he rode a three wheel bicycle.

They did know that something about his gender presentation and his anatomy didn't line up the way they thought it should.

- Mm-hm.

- The very first trip I went on went on, someone told me like Roy kept a journal every day, and his neighbors have all of them.

So I spent most of the 10 years I was reporting trying to persuade this neighbor to let me see the journals, and every year the neighbor told me no.

Eventually, he changed his mind, which you can kind of, there's a whole dramatic scene that you can read in the book about it.

But when we got the journals, it's not completely clear actually how Roy viewed himself, but he did write, it was just an innate sense that he had that he should dress this way and that he couldn't change it unless God worked a miracle in his life.

It can be really hard to be yourself in this world, but it can feel worse to be someone that you're not.

And sometimes, you know, you have to make that decision of like, I'm gonna, both of these roads are gonna be hard, but one of them is gonna be true to me, and I'm just gonna do it even though it's gonna be hard.

- Casey, thank you so much for writing this book and for being here today and being so open and honest with us.

I really appreciate it.

- Thank you for having me - And thank you for watching "A Word on Words".

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(bell dings) (soft music) - [Casey] It doesn't matter how good of a writer you are, you really can't fully capture the way a Southerner talks.

They're just all like such natural performers, and there's just no writing that.