TOMBOYLAND

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.