Tomboyland Essays

Melissa Faliveno

Book - 2020

"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."--Publisher's description.

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Essays
Published
New York : Little A/Topple Books [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Melissa Faliveno (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
244 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781542014199
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

"Growing up, I was a tomboy," the author writes. Now, as an androgynous adult, she is, ironically, often mistaken for a man, the male she wanted to be as a child. She also grew up to be bisexual, and, she says, her gender identity is "complicated." She sometimes calls herself genderqueer but more often simply queer, although her present long-term relationship is with a man. Such considerations are the stuff of this collection of highly personal, even confessional, essays, one of which, for example, vividly evokes her experiences with BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism). She also writes about her teenage skill playing softball and, as an adult, participating in roller derby. Although she now lives in New York, she often writes of growing up in the Midwest, in a small Wisconsin town. In "Motherland," arguably the best essay in the book, she writes affectingly about, yes, mothers but also about family--birth and chosen--and the grief that seems endemic to the women in her family. Together, the essays offer a full-dress portrait of a writer whom most readers will be intrigued to know.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Faliveno, a Sarah Lawrence creative writing instructor, explores identity in her winning debut collection. Throughout, she touches on themes of sexuality, gender, and femininity, all the while recalling her Wisconsin upbringing, with its softball, casseroles, and tornadoes. The last motif is the subject of the first essay, "The Finger of God," which revisits her youthful obsession with the meteorological phenomenon. In subsequent selections, Faliveno takes an unvarnished look at her upbringing and personal life. In "Tomboy," she gives both an etymological and personal history of the word, recalling that "growing up, I was a tomboy," while now "I don't look like a woman, and I don't always feel like one." In the same essay, Faliveno tackles "the internalized homophobia" she's "been carrying around for so long," while in "Meat and Potatoes," she recounts her experiences with openly nonmonogamous relationships and BDSM. In "Gun Country," she considers mass shootings both generally, in terms of how "anger and rage intersect with gender and violence," and personally, in terms of widespread gun ownership among her family and friends growing up. Readers who prefer to answer their questions about gender and sexuality with more questions will appreciate this perceptive meditation. Agent: Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, Foundry. (Aug.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Reading a memoir is like meeting someone for the first time, the opportunity to make a new friend. Encountering Faliveno (creative writing, Sarah Lawrence Coll.) is a pleasure. Here, we learn the author is from Wisconsin but seemingly not of it, has been a jock, into BDSM, maybe a rageaholic. She is also a sensitive commentator on the topsy-turvy world of the gender systems she grew up in and an exquisite self-analyst of her own androgyny. In eight longish personal essays, she reflects on relationships with lovers, coaches, and family members. A piece on softball offers a classic examination of how sports interact with gender, class, and sexuality. Faliveno further contemplates her ten years living in New York but focuses more on her coming of age in the Midwest, in writing with a quality of cinematic vividness. VERDICT Readers of all kinds will wish to sit down with this tomboy, not just those interested in issues of androgyny. Recommended.--David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A collection of essays exploring the Midwest, gender, family, and guns, among other topics. Faliveno, the former Poets & Writers senior editor who now teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence, was born just a year before the devastating 1984 tornado that wiped out Barneveld, Wisconsin, eight miles from her hometown, Mount Horeb, "a small, God-fearing town…a blue-collar place dealing in livestock feed and John Deere tractors." In her debut book, Faliveno explores this "meat-and-potatoes" background and her experiences attending church, potluck dinners, and other community events, generally toeing the small-town line until she left home. But this is not just a wholesome exploration of flyover country, as the author also delves deeply into gender identity and the many confusions and complications involved. In the opening piece, "Finger of God," Faliveno chronicles the disastrous F5 tornado. She recounts how her mother confronted the sight of the brewing storm and hustled the family to the basement, reminisces about her love for the film Twister, and tells of her 2019 return to talk to residents who witnessed the original event. In "Tomboy," the author discusses her education and adult life in New York, where she experimented with kink as well as various expressions of her gender identity and struggled with being misgendered and misunderstood. "Sometimes, I call myself a woman," she writes. "But sometimes I avoid the word….Uncertainty is hardly unique among those of us born into female bodies, but as my own body moves through the world, it is marked by one common question: What are you? And the honest answer is--I don't really know." Throughout the collection, Faliveno remains inquisitive and resistant to labels, always maintaining her empowering agency. While some of the passages are repetitive, the majority of the essays are well-rendered investigations of self-identity. An expressive voice evolving deliberately, resisting having to be one thing or the other. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.