Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

Karen is driven to succeed based on merit and academics, while Byrd enjoys being brought up in southern white culture at the end of its era. Meanwhile, Byrd and now-Karen are raised in two completely different ways. Lee and his family hire private detectives to find Peggy and Mireille, but the most ever discovered is that their names have been changed. Peggy takes on the name Meg, while Mireille is given the name “Karen” and the birth certificate of a dead black girl Peggy steals from the records office. They assume the identities of black people in the backwaters of Virginia to avoid Lee. She takes the 4-year-old Mireille with her. Eventually, Peggy has enough and leaves Lee. Lee and Peggy become antagonistic toward one another as Peggy’s dreams of education and becoming a famous writer lose out to being a wife and mother, while Lee becomes emotionally controlling and demanding. Nevertheless, they ultimately have two children – a boy named Rhys Byrd “Byrdie” Fleming, and a girl named Mireille, nicknamed “Mickey”. The two get married, but their romance quickly wears off as both realize their homosexuality is unavoidable.

The two begin having sex frequently, during which time Peggy becomes pregnant. She considers that the manly qualities she has been looking for in women she has found in a man. Peggy, likewise, finds herself taken aback by how much she enjoys Lee’s masculinity, and his being in control. He imagines this must be because she is much more like a boy than other girls, and considers that maybe he has simply been pursuing the wrong kind of girl.

Lee is a closeted gay, and finds it strange that he is attracted to Peggy. A lesbian, she unsuccessfully pursues other girls until she meets Lee Fleming, a professor and famous poet eight years older than she is. When the novel begins, Peggy Villaincourt is a 17-year-old freshman at Stillwater College in Virginia. “Mislaid” is an historical social novel by Nell Zink which follows the lives of a married homosexual couple, the lesbian Peggy and the gay Lee, and their children over the course of three decades.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire