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Goetsch, Diana. This Body I Wore: A Memoir. Farrar. May 2022. 336p. ISBN 9780374115098. $28. MEMOIR

An award-winning poet and essayist who taught at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School for over two decades, Goetsch delivers a memoir not of transition but of living a trans life that unfolded over decades; she was active in New York’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s–90s but transitioned later. As she says, “How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential truth about yourself and still not see it?” Her story is thus personal while also running parallel to the emergence of the trans community in recent decades.

Park, Casey. Diary of a Misfit. Knopf. May 2022. 352p. ISBN 9780525658535. $28.95. MEMOIR

Raised in the rural South, Park came out as a lesbian in 2002; her mother promptly shut her out, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But her tough, conservative grandmother confided that she had grown up across the street from a woman who lived as a man and asked Park to find out what happened to the person she knew as Roy. A Washington Post reporter, Park used investigative skills to chase down Roy’s story, which she blends here with memoir as she examines her own sexuality and her fraught relationship with mother. Winner of a 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award.

Reang, Putsata. Ma and Me: A Memoir. MCD: Farrar. May 2022. 368p. ISBN 9780374279264. $28. MEMOIR

When Reang was 11 months old, her family fled Cambodia, and she survived only because her mother thrust her seemingly lifeless baby on the medical staff at the U.S. naval base in the Philippines where the family first landed. Reang grew up seeking to be the perfect Cambodian daughter and was especially close to her mother, a tie that frayed when Reang came out in her twenties and snapped altogether when Reang, at age 40, married a woman. Journalist Reang here considers inherited trauma and the weight of cultural and filial obligation. (For another view of such trauma, see Anthony Veasna So’s excellent story collection, Afterparties.)

Rouse, Wade. Magic Season: A Son’s Story. Hanover Square: Harlequin. May 2022. 288p. ISBN 9781335475176. $27.99. MEMOIR

Having achieved success in public relations, Rouse went on to win awards as a memoirist and accolades as best-selling author of the popular fiction he writes under his grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman. But as a queer man, he had always had an uneasy relationship with his conservative, standoffish engineer father. Finally, as his father was dying, the two found reconciliation and comfort in their relationship, particularly in their shared love of baseball. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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