Harare Review of Books

254 pages.

First published in 2020.

Finished reading on May 7, 2021.

Genre: Non-fiction (Essays)

A fiercely personal and startlingly universal essay collection about the mysteries of gender and desire, of identity and class, of the stories we tell and the places we call home.

Flyover country, the middle of nowhere, the space between the coasts. The American Midwest is a place beyond definition, whose very boundaries are a question. It’s a place of rolling prairies and towering pines, where guns in bars and trucks on blocks are as much a part of the landscape as rivers and lakes and farms. Where girls are girls and boys are boys, where women are mothers and wives, where one is taught to work hard and live between the lines. But what happens when those lines become increasingly unclear? When a girl, like the land that raised her, finds herself neither here nor there?

In this intrepid collection of essays, Melissa Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she’s traveled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us even long after we’ve left. Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage, Tomboyland navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains, kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood, Faliveno asks curious, honest, and often darkly funny questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman, family, and home.

I first came across Faliveno’s words in an extract of one of these essays (somewhere), and was blown away by the description of place — so much so that I put Tomboyland on my Amazon wishlist. I love place, and she does that so well!

So, these are very thoughtful essays, that I learnt from; I thought about my own life a lot. It’s also always wonderful to hear from a queer person, and she is very open about her life, and struggles, and her wins, too. Occasionally rambling, or with repetitive ideas (mostly from essay to essay); but I still read every word, and it was very much worth my time.

Rated: 8/10