Tomboyland: Essays by Melissa Faliveno
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Melissa Faliveno has written one of the best essay collections I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. I couldn’t put the book down, devouring the whole collection in one evening.
Her essays—which double as a memoir—take the reader through “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.”
What’s so compelling about the collection is Faliveno’s willingness to invite you into some of her most intimate thoughts and fears and aspirations and loves while painting each of those into the larger landscape of American culture. It’s a deft trick, using the personal as a conduit into examining the world in which we live.
And yet the book doesn’t feel like a cultural critique. Instead, Tomboyland: Essays is an intimate window into how difficult it is to move through our culture when all of these forces of gender and identity are constantly smashing against you.
One word of warning: If you read in public, prepare for some ugly crying! Bring tissues!
You can listen to Episode 84 with Melissa Faliveno on The Downtown Writers Jam podcast.
