'Tomboyland' Stresses The Importance Of Roots — And Knowing When To Grow Up And Away
Throughout her essays, Melissa Faliveno is constantly straddling blurry lines, never willing to let any of her topics lie comfortably still, always turning them over to look at another facet.
Melissa Faliveno exists in liminal spaces, but her debut essay collection Tomboyland opens and ends in the landscapes that shaped her: Mount Horeb, the small town (or, technically, village) that she grew up in — the stretch of hills called the Blue Mounds, and southwestern Wisconsin more broadly.
Faliveno has lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade now, and has witnessed how, "especially after the 2016 election [...] people on the coast began to talk about Midwesterners as if they were nothing more than uneducated, gun-toting rednecks." She complicateswhose essays are a love letter to, reckoning with, and examination of her midwestern upbringing.
